A parametric fault displacement model to introduce kinematic control into modeling faults from sparse data

Fault-related displacements impact oil and gas flow predictions at reservoir scales. We have integrated a quantitative description of fault-related deformation directly embedded into the structural modeling workflow. Consistent fault displacements are produced using numerical fault operators that deform horizons in accordance with theoretical isolated fault displacement models to generate kinematically consistent structural models. We compare structural modeling approaches based on such fault operators with those relying on interpolation. Several synthetic cross sections are generated from a reference high-resolution structural model of the Santos Basin, Brazil. Models are reconstructed from this 2D synthetic sparse data set using both methods. Their ability to produce consistent structural models is assessed by comparing reconstructed and reference models. On this example, kinematic modeling improves the quality of automatically generated models when only few or poor-quality observations are available, thus reducing the time needed for structural validation.