Modeling regional faults for land subsidence prediction

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.