Abstract
Subsurface reservoirs are generally highly fractured, whereby fractures constitute a natural fluid flow path and define the preferential flow direction. Slip accumulated during the faulting process alters also the petrophysical properties of the host rock. Although the mechanical alteration of the host rock, and related porosity and permeability changes, due to fault slip has been previously described, a predictive physics-based model has not been scaled with fault length in reservoirs to provide an initial porosity permeability alteration model yet. In this study, we develop a predictive model to quantify how accumulated fault slip changes porosity and permeability in a porous medium, by combining deformation modeling based on triangular dislocations and linearized poro-elasticity equations. We applied our model the Ghawar field fault map and rock-types. We conducted a Monte-Carlo simulation, varying fault roughness and accumulated slip, to quantify the corresponding variation in porosity and permeability using a 5 km long strike-slip fault and three different rock-types. Our Monte-Carlo simulation shows that long-term accumulated slip on rough strike-slip fault surfaces change porosity by ±1%, leading to an absolute permeability change of up to 22.5%. We further used these results as a benchmark for the elastic response of porous rocks to accumulated slip scaled to certain fault length. Using these benchmark results for Ghawar field reservoir rocks, we determined the slip-related porous medium permeability changes for every fault on the Ghawar fault map, accounting for their length, location, and orientation. In doing so, we found that fault roughness, slip amount, and shear sense all affect the medium’s permeability, creating substantial permeability anisotropies. Locally, these anisotropies are further enhanced by superposition of permeability changes of individual faults that constitute the fault system. We suggest the resulting permeability distribution model should be used as the initial permeability model for porous media in fractured reservoirs.
•Host rock deformation due to fracture growth by recurrent slip.•Coupling the linearized equations of triangular dislocation and poro-elasticity.•Assessing the effects of roughness on porous rock deformation.•Monte Carlo simulation on parameter space of fault and rock properties.•Benchmarking the deformation and scaling it up to fault networks in geo-reservoirs.