A new approach to investigate the effect of burial depth and clay content on fault permeabilities applied at the Njord Field

Fault permeability prediction typically relies on empirical relationships between permeability and clay content or burial depth. Calibration of such methods relies on either core data or subsurface observations of fluid pressure and hydrocarbon contact offsets across faults. Published core data suggest that no relationships exist between host rock clay content and fault permeability for phyllosilicate-framework fault rocks, whereas published subsurface calibration data suggest otherwise. We here present a new method for calibration of fault rock permeabilities to subsurface pressure data. This approach is an analogue from electrical engineering to compute fault permeabilities across all major faults in a study area and optimise depth and clay content dependence of fault permeabilities. We tested this method at the Jurassic section of the Norwegian Njord Field area, where faults span the depth range of 2.7- 4.5 km and the lowest clay content in individual faults varies between 8.9 to 25.7%. The flow-restricting faults at Njord are phyllosilicate-framework fault rocks. Our modelling shows that fault rock permeability decreases with burial depth, whereas the clay content has nearly no impact. Sensitivity analyses show that these results are robust. Therefore, SGR-based algorithms for fault seal prediction cannot be expected to give good fault permeability predictions for seismic-scale faults at Njord. Thematic collection: This article is part of the Fault and top seals 2022 collection available at: https://www.lyellcollection.org/topic/collections/fault-and-top-seals-2022 Supplementary material: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.6824325