Carbonate Fault Seal: How Can we Improve its Predictability?

Abstract

Summary A significant knowledge gap exists when analysing and predicting the behaviour of faults within carbonate reservoirs. To improve this, a large database of carbonate fault rock properties has been collected as part of a consortium led by the University of Leeds and Badleys. This Carbonate Fault Rock project has been successful in discovering key controls on fault rock development, including their petrophysical properties. Many tens of faults within carbonates have been analysed from a range of lithofacies, tectonic regimes, burial depths and displacements, and porosity and permeability measurements from over 300 samples have been made, with the goal to find trends controlling fault rock development. Factors have been examined to assess their control on fault rock permeabilities, such as tectonic regime, displacement, depth of burial, host lithofacies, lithofacies juxtaposition, host porosity and host permeability. The results show which factors have the more significant influence on fault rock properties, and are used to generate a predictive algorithm to compute fault permeability and transmissibility multipliers in carbonate reservoir models.