The feasibility of using InSAR technique to measure land subsidence caused by petroleum extraction

Although groundwater withdrawal is considered to be the main and most common cause of land subsidence, extraction of oil and gas, or minerals from beneath the earth's surface also results in land subsidence. Land subsidence over oil and gas fields leads to several natural and manufactured disasters such as critical and strategic infrastructure destruction. In addition, it imposes significant costs on the oil industry, which indicates the need to control and monitor land subsidence in oil fields. Due to irrecoverable damage caused by this phenomenon, it is necessary to regularly monitor areas subject to subduction in oil and gas fields. There are different ways to measure crustal deformation in Geomatics engineering based on geodetic and remote sensing technologies. Despite high accuracy, the use of geodetic techniques such as Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to regularly monitor crustal deformation in a wide coverage is limited by some disadvantages like discontinuous data collection, the need for installation of the equipment on the ground or direct contact with the ground which is time- and cost-consuming. InSAR technology has been widely used in recent decades to monitor crustal deformations with high spatiotemporal resolution and lower cost and time. This study aims to present a new methodology based on the Persistent Scatterer-InSAR (PS-InSAR) method to investigate the correlation between land subsidence and petroleum extraction in the southwestern region of Iran with active oil and gas fields during two periods from 2017/04 to 2017/10 and from 2019/04 to 2019/10, respectively with the highest and lowest petroleum extraction. The results showed that subductions of 10 to 30 cm during the period of 2017/04 to 2017/10 with an annual rate of 20 to 50 cm have occurred in southwestern Iran around the active oil fields which might be due to the significant petroleum extraction since 2016.