Incorporating fault properties in groundwater flow models: Gloucester basin NSW, Australia

More and varied resources are being discovered within our sedimentary basins including minable minerals and coal, conventional and unconventional oil and gas, geothermal energy and water resources. In addition, there is a growing need to utilize pore space for carbon storage to abate atmospheric CO2 emissions. In some regions Managed Aquifer Recharge is an important alternative to surface water storage and as mitigation to declining water levels from over extraction. These combined effects create a challenge for effective integrated basin management. Cumulative impacts can have beneficial and detrimental effects on basin resources and environmental values. Regulators and industry need to model hydrodynamic processes, history match models to monitoring bore network observations and forecast cumulative impacts at the sub-basin to basin scale. This paper explores 1) techniques for characterising fault zone dynamic properties, 2) methodologies of incorporating fault zone architecture and dynamic properties in regional groundwater flow models, and 3) ground-truthing the methodology with a case study of the highly faulted Gloucester Basin in NSW, Australia.