Improved characterization of fault zones by quantitative integration of seismic and production data

This paper proposes a method for the parameterization and characterization of fault facies models including a fault core and a fault damage zone containing either fractures or deformation bands, typically associated with carbonate and sandstone reservoirs, respectively. We represent the faulted reservoir models with a relatively small number of parameters and focus on the inverse problem; that is, how to estimate transmissibility of the fault core and the parameters of the fractures or deformation bands that determine the effective stiffness and permeability tensors in the damage zone. Our workflow is based on a consistent stiffness-permeability model for the fractured or composite porous media in the damage zone, and a Bayesian (Monte Carlo Markov chain) method of inversion, which provides information about uncertainties as well as the most likely values of the model parameters. For simplicity, we have assumed that the damage zone consists of a single set of fractures or deformation bands that are parallel with the (vertical) fault core, but the forward modelling part of our workflow can easily be extended to deal with more complex situations involving multiple sets of fractures and/or deformation bands that are characterized by different shapes and orientations. The results of our numerical experiments suggest that one can indeed obtain an improved characterization of fault zones by quantitative integration of seismic AVAZ and production data using the workflow presented in this paper.