This review summarizes the potential and challenges of supercritical carbon dioxide (SC-CO ₂ ) enhanced shale gas recovery and sequestration in shale reservoirs.

Source locations provide fundamental information on earthquakes and lay the foundation for seismic monitoring at all scales. Seismic source location as a classical inverse problem has experienced significant methodological progress during the past century. Unlike the conventional traveltime‐based location methods that mainly utilize kinematic information, a new category of waveform‐based methods, including partial waveform stacking, time reverse imaging, wavefront tomography, and full waveform inversion, adapted from migration or stacking techniques in exploration seismology has emerged. Waveform‐based methods have shown promising results in characterizing weak seismic events at multiple scales, especially for abundant microearthquakes induced by hydraulic fracturing in unconventional and geothermal reservoirs or foreshock and aftershock activity potentially preceding tectonic earthquakes. This review presents a comprehensive summary of the current status of waveform‐based location methods, through elaboration of the methodological principles, categorization, and connections, as well as illustration of the applications to natural and induced/triggered seismicity, ranging from laboratory acoustic emission to field hydraulic fracturing‐induced seismicity, regional tectonic, and volcanic earthquakes. Taking into account recent developments in instrumentation and the increasing availability of more powerful computational resources, we highlight recent accomplishments and prevailing challenges of different waveform‐based location methods and what they promise to offer in the near future.

Waveform-based seismic location methods can reliably and automatically image weak seismic sources, such as microseismic events and microtremors. Besides the classical diffraction stacking operator which is based on the one-way traveltime, correlation-based imaging methods are another subcategory of waveform-based methods using differential traveltime. In this work, we systematically analyse the existing correlation-based methods and propose a novel hybrid correlation stacking method, which belongs to waveform-based relative location methods. The double differential traveltime from an event pair (i.e. a master event and a target event) to a receiver pair is used to stack the corresponding double correlation waveforms in this new approach. We generalize the correlation-based methods using a unified formula by describing cross-correlation stacking with beamforming. A thorough analysis of these imaging operators using synthetic and field data examples reveals their different characteristics of imaging resolution and level of redundancy, and a moderate level of redundancy can ensure both the accuracy and stability of correlation-based imaging methods, while an extremely high or low level of redundancy will hinder their performance in locating weak seismic events. The examples also demonstrate the potential disadvantage of using multiple phases with inaccurate velocity models for waveform-based location methods.