Integration of outcrop with borehole data to improve fractured reservoir models

Knowledge of reservoir-scale fracture patterns is important to assess their physical properties (e.g., facture connectivity) and to constrain numerical simulations. This is particularly true in the case of distributed fractures which affect large volumes of rocks but cause deformations far below the seismic resolution. A common way to model reservoir scale fracture fields is to upscale borehole data (e.g., Rawnsley et al., 1997; Wu and Pollard, 2002). Knowledge from boreholes has spatial scales of 10-2 – 100 m and needs to be extrapolated by a few orders of magnitude to the scale of reservoirs, typically 101-103 m, using statistical methods (Fig. 1). This process, however, suffers from the limited ability of borehole data to sample fracture populations correctly (e.g., Peacock, 2006) and from the adequacy of the extrapolation procedure.