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7th Middle East Geosciences Conference and Exhibition
Manama, Bahrain
March 27-29, 2006
1 School of Earth Sciences, Leeds University, Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK, United Kingdom, phone:
00441132438897, [email protected]
2 Rock Deformation Research
3University of Leeds, Rock Deformation Research, School of Earth Sciences, Leeds, LS2 9JT, United Kingdom
With only 10% world-wide drilling success, oil exploration is considered a high-risk game. Faults play a major role in this
game. Faults are fundamental to prospect and play assessment as well as to production and field development. They are
commonly an overlooked component in the evaluation of hydrocarbon accumulation and migration. The last decade has
seen a rapid growth in our understanding of the variables that control fault
sealing potential. Despite the current
understanding of such variables, practical techniques are few and faults are commonly risked in an intuitive, qualitative
manner. Few studies, however, demonstrated that using qualitative
fault
seal analysis, using those few techniques
available, improves successes ratios and reduces costly errors in field development.
In this study, the effects of two different representations of faults on the derived history match are compared for the Pierce
Field, North Sea. In the first case, fault
transmissibilities were tuned and the faults were extended in order to improve the
history match (conventional history matching). In the second case, a step-by-step derivation of the
fault
transmissibilities in
the Pierce Field was adopted based upon the integration of collected and upscaled properties of the host rock along with
some empirical relationships. A detailed analysis, supported by microstructural and pertophysical as well as capillary
pressure mercury injection
fault
rock data were used to assign a spectrum of transmissibility multipliers along
fault
planes to
capture the effect of the buoyancy force generated by the hydrocarbon column height on the sealing capacity of the faults.
History production data were used to compare the effectiveness of the two methods. The results demonstrate the
effectiveness of the derived transmissibilities model in generating a satisfactory history match in a relatively short time
period.