An Improved Method for Generating Fault Zone Grid

Faults are volumetric in nature and can cause complex fluid flow inside the fault zone because of its
special fault zone architecture and different petrophysical properties from the host rock. Thus explicit fault
zone modeling is important for capturing the fluid flow inside and through the fault zone precisely.
Generation of a refined volumetric fault zone grid is the first step to perform explicit fault zone modeling.
An algorithm for generating volumetric fault zones has already been implemented in Havana, however this
algorithm failed to generate continuous top and bottom surfaces for the fault zone. This lead to internal
discontinuities in the fault zone grid, and made it hard to run flow simulations on the grid. We now present
an improved version of the algorithm that works well on complex faults and indicate the capability of
explicit fault facies modelling of real field cases.