Fault removal in geological models

Abstract

Method for transforming a discontinuous, faulted subsurface reservoir into a continuous, fault-free space where a complete geological model based on selected geological concepts can be built and updated efficiently. Faults are removed in reverse chronological order () to generate a pseudo-physical continuous layered model, which is populated with information according to the selected geological concept (). The fault removal is posed as an optimal control problem where unknown rigid body transformations and relative displacements on fault surfaces are found such that deformation of the bounding horizons and within the volume near the fault surface are minimized (). A boundary-element-method discretization in an infinite domain is used, with boundary data imposed only on fault surfaces. The data populated model may then be mapped back to the original faulted domain such that a one-to-one mapping between continuous and faulted spaces may be found to a desired tolerance ().