Quantifying the Anisotropy of Permeability in Stressed Rock

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Fluid flow in rocks is vitally important for a wide range of natural processes and human activities, including the triggering of earthquakes, the extraction of oil, gas and water from subsurface reservoirs, and the storage of waste products such as CO2 or radioactive waste. Fluid flow in the Earth's crust takes place through connected networks of pores, cracks and fractures, and is driven by differences in fluid pressure. We measure the ability of rocks to conduct fluid as permeability, and rocks are known to exhibit strong directional variations - or anisotropy - of this key transport property. Laboratory experiments and in situ borehole tests have shown that permeability can vary by several orders of magnitude - i.e. by factors of 100 or 1000 - in different directions. Permeability is also known to be highly dependent on the stress in the solid rock matrix. Again, finely controlled laboratory tests and rather less well constrained in-situ measurements from the subsurface show this to be the case. A key problem though is that the laboratory tests conducted to date have been conducted under simplified stress conditions which do not match the actual anisotropy of in situ stress within the crust. This makes it very difficult to interpret and apply the published laboratory data to more general geological situations, such as fluid flow around seismically active fault zones or reducing risks for CO2 storage in fractured porous reservoirs, with any degree of confidence. Our proposal is to use a new apparatus at UCL which can apply fully anisotropic (truly triaxial) stress to fluid saturated rock samples of sandstone and granite. Cubic or rectangular shaped blocks of rock will be compressed by three pairs of metal rams, symmetrically arranged at 90 degrees to each other around the sample. This will allow us to vary each of the 3 main (principal) stresses independently. Rock samples will be large enough (5 x 5 x 5 cm cubes, for example) to contain quasi-homogeneous distributions of pores and cracks. We will modify this unique apparatus to enable measurement of permeability along any of the three loading directions that compress the rock. Our proposal builds on recent award-winning research at Aberdeen, where permeability anisotropy has been measured in on oriented samples from a natural fault zone, and carefully related to the pore fabric within the rock. We aim to link the anisotropy of permeability with the anisotropy of stress and the anisotropy of the void space (= pores + cracks). We will define new empirical equations from our quantitative laboratory tests and porosity characterisations. These data and relationships will be used in state-of-the-art computer models of fault zones to explore how directional variations in fluid flow (permeability anisotropy) affect the probability and the type of slip events expected along a fault zone. This will provide a much improved understanding of the risks from earthquake-prone faults in the crust, and more generally, we will begin to understand the truly 3D nature of fluid flow in rocks.