Natural Fractures Characterization

Complete consulting services in natural fractures characterization and modeling
Fracture statistics
Analysis of outcrop and image log data to generate fracture statistics (per orientation, type, conductivity, etc.) that will be later used to calibrate seismic data
Petrophysics and rock physics in the presence of fractures
Analysis of petrophysical and elastic properties of fractured rocks. Identification of ductile and "brittle" facies using lithology and fracture information in vertical and horizontal wells.
Generation of fracture related attributes
Estimation of strain and curvature from 2D surfaces and 3D poststack seismic volumes. Surfaces may come from interpreted horizons or densely sampled formation tops. Estimation of orientation, intensity and Fisher coefficient (circular variance) from structural attributes
QC and calibration of fracture related attributes
Quality control of fracture related attributes from poststack and prestack data including azimuthal AVO and azimuthal velocity analysis. Calibration with independent fracture information from outcrop, image logs, local stress, microseismic and other petrophysical and production data.
Prepare input for fracture modeling
Create fracture intensity volumes calibrated with well data for bed-bound fractures following mechanical stratigraphy. Generate 3D volumes of intensity for through-going fractures, local orientations and Fisher coefficient.
Continuous Fracture Modeling (CFM)
Generate "combined" fracture intensity volumes for all fracture types for different mixing parameters.
Discrete Fracture Network (DFN) modeling
Use intensity, orientation and Fisher coefficient for different fracture types along with additional geologic information (aperture, aspect ratio, layer thickness) to generate discrete fractures that honor fracture counts from FMI data.
Geomechanics and calibration with production data
Estimate critically stressed fractures and local orientations of maximum horizontal permeability based on maximum horizontal stress. Calibrate with production data. Upscale permeability for flow simulation.
Calibrate your own data
Proper calibration of seismic derived fracture information for flow properties starts with a estimation of the stress state. Check our stress polygon calculator and input the parameters. Then, for a given stress state, we can estimate. Check our effective permeability calculator to see how we can transform geometrical fracture information and intensity along with stress information to estimate the dominant orientation of flow in a cell of a geological grid or a seismic volume. We can apply the same process to an entire volume.