Sixth International Conference on Fault and Top Seals

26-28 September 2022 – Vienna, Austria

The Sixth International Conference on Fault and Top Seals will take place from 26-28 September 2022 in Vienna, Austria. Past conferences were highly successful in bringing together scientists from different industries (petroleum, CO2 storage and radioactive waste disposal) and academia, with a wide range of backgrounds (geology, petroleum engineering, petrophysics, geophysics, modelling, geomechanics and geochemistry) to share experiences in this field.

We are excited to bring together those working on faults and top seals from a range of disciplines, as this is crucial to enhance and share our knowledge in order to reduce uncertainty for any future applications.

Invitation to Fault and Top Seals 2022

The Sixth International Conference on Fault and Top Seals will take place 26-28 September 2022 in Vienna, Austria. 

Describing the properties of fault and top seals has been in the focus of different industries and applications.  Not only do traditional methods of assessing fault and top seals remain crucial for exploration and production of petroleum reservoirs, but the ever-increasing efforts to reduce our carbon footprint means that accurately characterizing both fault and top seals for carbon capture and storage, geothermal energy solutions and radioactive waste disposal is crucial.  Further, the application of fault and top seal prediction within these emerging technologies often leaves low/no wiggle room for any uncertainty.    This has shown by a notable increase of interest on attribute prediction of fault and top seals within the last years and decades, to improve our knowledge and reduce the subsequent uncertainties.

The 2019 field trip to San Vito lo Capo Peninsula (Palermo, Italy) provided an excellent natural laboratory to study the structural setting of western Sicily.

The conference is a great opportunity to meet with a close-knit but diverse community of scientists in fields such as petroleum, CO2 storage and radioactive waste disposal.

Estimating the membrane capillary behavior together with the mechanical properties of fault/top seal lithology is crucial for any subsurface risk assessment at any project’s stage: early subsurface exploration to late production/utilization.  For a complete fault and top seal assessment, a multidisciplinary approach is required.  Hence, this conference aims to bring together those working from a wide range of disciplines (i.e. structural geology, geomechanics, geophysics, petrophysics, geochemistry, reservoir engineering, hydrogeology), from both academia and industry, to attract presentations showing the latest advances from a range of approaches (i.e. outcrop analogues, laboratory analysis, framework and reservoir modelling, simulations etc.).  Enhancing our knowledge from differing techniques will ultimately lead to a reduction in the uncertainty for traditional applications, but also for future applications or growing industry sectors.

Most recent scientific results and application case studies will be shown in oral sessions and poster presentations followed by discussion sessions. Key topics will include new applications for fault and top seal analysis, geomechanical modelling, fault seal in carbonates and many others.  The conference will close with a 1-day fieldtrip in the Vienna surroundings.