Modeling regional faults for land subsidence prediction

摘要

The aim of the present communication is to investigate some aspects of the role exerted by active faults in anthropogenic land subsidence over a regional scale. The importance of regional faults depends on a variety of factors including depth of the depleted reservoir, fault orientation and size, geomechanical properties of porous medium, pore pressure drawdown induced by fluid production, etc. A few examples of faulted reservoirs are studied and discussed with the aid of a poroelastic finite element (FE) model specifically designed to address the fault mechanics over the macro-scale of interest. The results, although preliminary, provide a useful indication as to where and how fault activation can influence magnitude and extent of the land subsidence bowl above producing gas/oil reservoirs and point to a limited influence of the faults on the main occurrence.