From the microseismic data collected during multi-stage hydraulic fracturing, we may pick out the first arrival times for both P- and S-waves for each event and at each geophone. With triaxial geophones, the azimuths of the events may be derived from the hodograms. The P- and S-wave arrival times contain the distance information from the event location to the geophones as well as the event initiating time. The azimuth from hodograms gives the orientation information of the event locations. Inverting these interpreted microseismic data yields the event location parameters, which can be used to characterize the hydraulic fractures for reservoir modeling. This paper presents an efficient gradient-based microseismic event location inversion method. The forward model that is used to calculate the first arrival times is the finite-difference solution of the Eikonal equation. A novel method is devised to obtain the gradient of the first arrival times to the event location parameters in addition to the first arrival times in one forward model run. The method is applied to a realistic multilayer shale gas reservoir with a horizontal well and several stages of hydraulic fractures. The results show that the first arrival times obtained from the surface geophones yield better event location parameter estimation assuming we can pick up the events from the surface geophone signal. When the geophones are placed downhole in nearby wells, the inverted event locations are less accurate than the ones with surface geophones but can have a relative good characterization fo the fracture propagation.
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