3-D Upscaling of Fault
Damage Zones for Reservoir Modeling
Simon D. Harris, Atilla Vaszi, and Rob J. Knipe
Rock Deformation Research Limited, Leeds, United
Kingdom
The characterisation of the architecture of fault
zones, where a damage
zone surrounds the major slip surface, is only usually achievable via 2D maps,
or 1D line samples or well logs. In this paper we address issues related to
generating a 3D stochastic
fault
damage zone (FDZ) model that creates realistic
fault
systems resembling those encountered in nature, as well as developing a 3D
fault
flow model that can capture critical 3D upscaled properties of the damage
zone. The properties of interest to predict from the upscaling process include
the bulk permeability of selected domains, the
fault
rock thickness on
streamlines, the tortuosity and length of flow pathways, and the efficiency of
the
fault
network in behaving as a barrier to the flow. Examining the
fault
rock
thickness encountered on flow pathways across a major
fault
allows us to
investigate the ‘effective'
fault
rock thickness within the damage zone, thus
allowing the contribution of the whole FDZ to be incorporated into a large-scale
flow simulation.
Based upon a vast sequence of simulations through fault
damage zones with
varying
fault
length–frequency,
fault
density,
fault
orientation distributions
and spatial clustering relations, a summary of flow behaviours has been created,
which forms the basis for a predictive/uncertainty tool for the flow
characteristics of cells used in production simulation models.
AAPG Search and Discovery Article #90039©2005 AAPG Calgary, Alberta, June 16-19, 2005