First the computational mesh is separated into zones with different properties. We have three zones: the non-conductive rock (over/under/side burden), the reservoirs and the salt. The non-conductive rock needs to be populated with mechanical properties - Young’s modulus (E), Poisson ratio (ν) and density (ρ). In addition to these, a static water pressure should also be specified. The reservoirs also need to have a Biot coefficient A specified, permeability K and a porosity field φ and relative permeability curves. The salt, unlike the non-conductive rock and the reservoir sands is modeled by a plastic material.
The density, Young’s modulus and Poisson ratio supplied for this project exhibit moderate degree of hetero-geneity were used for all rock other then the salts. The pore-pressure in the non-reservoir rocks used in this project was derived by Joe Stefani (CVX).The porosity in the reservoir rock used was the effective porosity cube provided by CVX. Unfortunately, as is customary in the industry, no data was available for Biot’s coefficient. The permissible rangefor a scalar biot coefficient a is φ ≤ a ≤ 1. We used a scalar value of 0.95 which is a typical number that canbe derived via homogenization theory for well-connected porous microstructure (Popov, 2009).The relative permeabilities used are based on the Eclipse segregation model and were the same in all reservoir rocks. We used the same parameters that were used for SEAM TimeLapse project (2016).