This book deals exclusively with naturally fractured reservoirs and includes many subjects usually treated in separate volumes. A highly practical edition, Naturally Fractured Reservoirs is written for students, reservoir geologists, log analysts and petroleum engineers.

Naturally fractured reservoirs constitute a substantial percentage of remaining hydrocarbon resources; they create exploration targets in otherwise impermeable rocks, including under-explored crystalline basement; and they can be used as geological stores for anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Their complex behaviour during production has traditionally proved difficult to predict, causing a large degree of uncertainty in reservoir development. The applied study of naturally fractured reservoirs seeks to constrain this uncertainty by developing new understanding, and is necessarily a broad, integrated, interdisciplinary topic. This book addresses some of the challenges and advances in knowledge, approaches, concepts, and methods used to characterize the interplay of rock matrix and fracture networks, relevant to fluid flow and hydrocarbon recovery. Topics include: describing, characterizing and identifying controls on fracture networks from outcrops, cores, geophysical data, digital and numerical models; geomechanical influences on reservoir behaviour; numerical modelling and simulation of fluid flow; and case studies of the exploration and development of carbonate, siliciclastic and metamorphic naturally fractured reservoirs.

Streamline-Simulation emphasizes the unique features of streamline technology that in many ways complement conventional finite-difference simulation. It fills gaps in the mathematical foundations.

In the modem language of reservoir engineering by reservoir description is understood the totality of basic local information concerning the reservoir rock and fluids which by various procedures are extrapolated over the entire reservoir. Fracture detection, evaluation and processing is another essential step in the process of fractured reservoir description. In chapter 2, all parameters related to fracture density and fracture intensity, together with various procedures of data processing are discussed in detail. After a number of field examples, developed in Chap. 3, the main objective remains the quantitative evaluation of physical properties. This is done in Chap. 4, where the evaluation of fractures porosity and permeability, their correlation and the equivalent ideal geometrical models versus those parameters are discussed in great detail. Special rock properties such as capillary pressure and relative permeability are reexamined in the light of a double-porosity reservoir rock. In order to complete the results obtained by direct measurements on rock samples, Chap. 5 examines fracturing through indirect measurements from various logging results. The entire material contained in these five chapters defines the basic physical parameters and indicates procedures for their evaluation which may be used further in the description of fractured reservoirs.

This book provides a fundamental description of multiphase fluid flow through porous rock, based on understanding movement at the pore, or microscopic, scale.