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Well welcome to Reservoir Geomechanics.

As the subtitle of the course indicates,


it's about combining knowledge of the stresses
in the Earth—the forces in the Earth—with the principles of rock mechanics.
We'll use structural geology; we'll use
petroleum engineering; we'll use Earthquake seismology.
We're going to integrate a lot of these different fields
to address a number of problems of direct relevance
to oil and gas reservoirs as well as geothermal
reservoirs, problems related to CO<sub>2</sub> sequestration, and things like that.
The term geomechanics is sort of a new term.
It's kind of become popular in the last few years.
It means different things to different people.
What it means to me is this integration
of knowledge, quantitative knowledge of forces in the Earth,
quantitative knowledge of the physical properties and characterization of
the Earth, to then solve problems of practical importance.
Today's lecture is just sort of an overview.
I'm asking a lot of you to engage in carrying out
sitting through 20 lectures, doing eight homework assignments, and so on.
So I want to give you an idea of
what we're going to cover and where we're going.
Now, why is geomechanics important?
Why has this field sort of developed over the last
10 to 15 years, coming from sort of nowhere?
Well, in a real practical sense, if
you're interested in drilling and reservoir engineering problems
like compaction, compaction drive, subsidence, production-induced
faulting are all real problems people face everyday.
A parallel problem is optimizing drainage of fractured reservoirs.
Many, many reservoirs around the world are
fractured, and those fractures are essential to
the production, and we need to understand
those reservoirs in order to optimize production.
Hydraulic fracture propagation--here's the first typo of the course.
Hydraulic fracture propagation is controlled by the
stress field, and we'll talk about that.
And obviously hydraulic fracturing has been important
for a number of years but has
gotten increasingly more important with the development
of unconventional resources where the matrix permeabilities
are often on the scale of nanodarcies as opposed to millidarcies or even darcies.
Welbore stability is a huge problem that costs the industry
literally billions of dollars a year lost time due to
unstable wells, and it's geomechanics that helps us understand those
problems and avoid them as subsequent wells are drilled.
Anyway, a number of important problems
related to drilling and reservoir engineering.
On the more geologic and geophysical side, again
this is where fractured reservoirs are important.
Pore pressure prediction is extremely important. When we're
in a sedimentary basin where pore pressures are
elevated at depth, what I'll show you is it has a major control on the stress
field.
Okay, pore pressure and stress
are closely coupled, and when pore pressure
is extremely high, it's very hard to drill, because you have to balance the mud
weight (the density of the drilling mud) between the pore pressure--the
drilling mud has to be higher than the pore pressure so the well doesn't flow--
but lower--the density has to be sufficiently low that while it
is greater than the pore pressure it's less than the least principal stress--
because if the pressure exceeds the
least principal stress, you'll accidentally hydraulically
fracture the well, and this is what's referred to as the mud window,
the safe operating range of pressures between the
pore pressure and the least principal stress. And we
need to be able to predict pore pressure in
advance of drilling so you don't either have a
blowout because your pressures are too low, or
you have a collapsed well because you've fractured the
well unintentionally and all the drilling mud then disappears
out the fracture and then suddenly the well collapses.
Okay, a number of other geologic problems are of interest;
for example, fault seal integrity, understanding
how reservoirs are compartmentalized, understanding hydrocarbon migration.
You know, the buoyancy of hydrocarbons, of course, is the main
driving force for their movement, but exactly how they move, right?
Are they moving through the matrix permeability of a given formation?
Are they moving along conduits, fractures and faults?
Under what conditions is that migration sort of a dynamic process, an interplay
between pressure and containment by
either the fault or the hydraulic fracture?
And compartmentalization is a big deal.
Imagine that you are working for an oil company. You've identified a reservoir.
You've mapped faults in the reservoir.
Are those faults compartmentalizing the reservoir such that you need
to drill a well in each one of the compartments, one
or more wells, to produce the hydrocarbons or will there be
fluid flow across those faults and you need far fewer wells?
Well, we have some ideas about how to predict that.
Of course for about the last 10 years, you know, we're
all aware of the shale gas revolution, the ability
to drill horizontal wells and carry our multiple hydraulic fractures to produce
initially natural gas from these extremely low permeability source rocks, right?
The organic rich shales from which the hydrocarbons originally
you know were derived, and so we're producing natural gas directly from the
source not from the reservoir and over coming the extremely low matrix perm.
Now that technology is being applied more
broadly to tight oil reservoirs and so what's
happening now around the world is horizontal drilling
and multi stage hydraulic fracturing are being used.
To go back to you know, reservoirs that have
been recognized for many decades, but they were uneconomic
to produce until being able to, you know, increase
production through this horizontal drawing and multi-stage frac’ing process.
This is a field of research
that my group has been very much involved in.
And so toward the end of the course, I'm going to take
everything's that's come before then put it in the context of this.
I'll describe this in a little bit more in detail in a few minutes.
In the course we're going to follow a book that
I wrote and originally published in 2007 called Reservoir Geomechanics.
The book is divided into 3 sections.
The first section, chapters 1 through 5, is on basic principles.
The second section is on, you know, how we actually
come up with this measurement of the stress in the Earth.
For many, many decades, people struggled with this
problem because you know, you can't see stress.
You can see deformation and strain; you can see faults. But
you can't actually see the force that's in the rock.
Stress is most simply defined as force per unit area, and it was
thought to be almost an intractable problem, but over the last 30 years
a series of techniques have been developed that allow us to actually quantify
the force. And you can think about it in a very simple way.
If we want to understand whether a rock is going to
fail--perhaps this is a rock sample in the laboratory--the
failure of that rock is going to be controlled by the
intrinsic strength of that rock and the forces that you apply.
And it doesn't matter how much you know about the strength, if you don't know
anything about the forces, you're not going to be
able to say anything about its potential failure.
And so you need both sides, you know, both types of
information, you know, to be able to address the question.
And it's the same question when we get around to the slippage of faults.
It's the same question as we decrease pressure due to production, whether a
rock is going to start to internally
collapse, whether we'll have elastic compaction. In all
of these things, we need to know both about the rock and about the stresses.
and then we can ask ourselves what the effect of any perturbation might be, okay?
And the third part of the book is on applications. as I mentioned.
The syllabus is pretty straightforward. We're just going
to plow through the book in a sequence
of, let's see, 16 lectures, starting with the
next lecture, which will start with Chapter 1.
Distributed through the lectures are a series of homework assignments
that basically build on the principles that, you know, it's
one thing to say, okay we're going to determine the vertical
stress as the first step in building a geomechanical model.
The vertical stress is the result of the
weight of the overlying rock. We can learn
about the weight of the overlying rock from
something like a density log, which are routinely collected.
But, okay, so that's it, you got it, but when you actually, you know, sit
down with a density log and you actually
try to calculate the vertical stress, there are always
some little idiosyncrasies that sort of make you
think. And throughout the course all 8 of
these homework assignments are intended to sort of
illustrate and build upon the principles that are discussed
in the lectures discussed in the book.
But to give you sort of a hands on feel
for what real data look like so, you know, that you
can actually go through this and do it on your
own at some time in the future outside the class.
The same thing is true for pore pressure
prediction, which is the second chapter of the book.
The same thing is true for rock strength.
Now rock, you know, the ideas surrounding rock strength, and sort
of rock mechanics in sort of a modern view, have been around
for 40 or 50 years, but the practical issue is that,
in the oil and gas industry, you have very few core samples.
You almost never have core samples of
the rocks outside the reservoirs and, for example,
if you're facing problems of wellbore
stability, the issue is not the reservoir, necessarily,
it's getting to the reservoir, and it's
that overburden that you need to understand in
the variation of rock's strength. And the only
information that we typically have is from geophysical logs.
And so we'll go through the exercise
of estimating rock strength from geophysical logs.
And then we'll talk about faults and fractures.
Faults and fractures in rock are extremely important in many, many different
contexts.
And we'll work with some real data and
you'll actually analyze the fault and fracture data.
And then you're going to use that
information later in the subsequent homework assignments.
Now, the middle part of the course is related
to, you know, measuring stress, and this would seem
to be, well, why don't I just give a
lecture on measuring stress, and be done with it?
Well, it's taken me about 30 years to sort of have a idea about how
we measure stress, or how we estimate stress or how we put bounds on the stress.
And what we want to do, of course, is use the data coming from the
place of interest, and we'll take some time to go through all that.
And I'll make some illustration of
these principles here again in a few minutes.
As I mentioned before, the stress field controls hydraulic fracturing.
We want to talk about that. And it
turns out that hydraulic fracturing, small scale hydraulic
fractures, are the best way to understand one
component of the stress field, the minimum principal stress.
We're going to talk about the failure of wells.
What do I mean by the failure of wells,
is, obviously, we draw cylindrical wells, but they don't stay cylindrical because
of a stress concentration around those
wells, that actually affect the wellbore wall.
Well, this is something we can study and this is
something we can use to make estimates of what the stress magnitudes are.
And then we'll conclude the middle section with this global review
of the state of stress in sedimentary basins around the world.
The third part of the book,
the applications, wellbore stability, critically stress fractures and faults:
That means faults in the Earth that are close to the point of failure.
Faults in the Earth that, with a small perturbation, can be caused to slip.
Faults in the Earth that are in this state tend to be permeable
compared to other faults in the Earth's crust.
So in other words, faults which are mechanically alive
in the current stress field are also hydraulically alive.
So this idea of a critically stressed
crust is something that's going to come back
over and over again in this class and is important in many, many different ways.
Then we'll talk about applications to this fault seal
and dynamic hydrocarbon migration process that I referred to before.
We'll talk about what happens in reservoirs when we deplete
them, when we change the pore pressure, and we'll talk about
issues of compaction, weak sands and surface subsidence, and
then we're going to conclude the course with these three lectures I mentioned
earlier:
Two lectures on horizontal drilling,
multistage hydraulic fracturing, exploitation of
these unconventional reservoirs, and then the final lecture is
going to be on a topic that has gotten to
be extraordinarily important in the last couple of years.
And that's the problem of geomechanics and triggered seismicity.
Occasionally, very rarely in fact, earthquakes
are triggered during hydraulic fracturing, but
because of the development of these
unconventional resources, the water that flows back
after hydraulic fracturing picks up contaminants, from the shales and there's
a lot more fluid injection, waste water injection, going on today than has gone
on in the past.
And what we're seeing is the occurrence of injection-induced seismicity in
many, many places where earthquakes normally would occur very infrequently.
I'll get back to this in a bit more detail at the end of the lecture today.
Now, one of the ways of sort of, proselytizing about geomechanics has been
to consider describing a reservoir geomechanically like describing a
reservoir geologically or describing a reservoir
with respect to its flow properties for
reservoir simulation, but instead now we're going to try to describe it
geomechanically,
which means building a geomechanical model, right? And I'll show you
what the components of that model are here in just a second.
And the purpose of this slide is to put the process of oil and gas development in
sort of a historical framework and think about geomechanics in that same framework.
So for example you start with exploration, okay?
Suppose you find a reservoir. You need to appraise
the reservoir, you do more drilling, you find out,
you know, what the potential resource is like, and then you develop a development
plan and you start drilling and
producing the hydrocarbons through what's called harvest.
And then you as production declines, you go through various secondary
and perhaps even tertiary recovery techniques,
and finally you abandon the reservoir.
Through that lifecycle, which will take, of course, decades, a lot of problems
arise.
For example, pore pressure prediction and wellbore stability
are problems that you have to face early on.
You don't want your wells blowing out; you don't want your wells collapsing, okay?
As you appraise the reservoir and start to develop it, you
start to ask yourselves questions
about fault seal, right, and compartmentalization.
How many wells are you going to need as you--in other types
of reservoirs you know, you might
be very interested in what fractures are present.
What do they mean for permeability anisotropy in your development scheme?
In other reservoirs, perhaps there are very weak sands
or weak chalks, and you're very concerned about how much
you can produce the reservoir without causing
irrevocable changes in the reservoir
properties, depletion-related compaction, okay?
And, so, on and so on.
And so the point that I emphasize, again, with
sort of a religious fervor, is that in the wells
that are drilled in the very first part of the
exploration process, you have the ability to build a geomechanical model.
And you can then use that geomechanical model through the
lifetime of the reservoir to solve these problems as they arise.
You don't have to build that model over and over again.
But of course, your model will be a lot
better as you go along than it is initially.
You'll have, you know, more limited data at the
first part of the process than along the way.
But this is a very tractable problem.
All the things that we're going to talk about, whether
it's the rock properties or the fractures or the
stress, are going to vary from place to place, but
they're going to to vary in sort of a coherent way.
And what we're going to start doing is building that model early on, and then
we're going to test that model as the drilling goes on and refine that model.
But nonetheless you can start very early and take advantage of that.
There's no point in struggling with problems
of wellbore stability for dozens and
dozens of wells, and then finally, you know, say a wellbore collapses
and you lose everything for that particularly well when, in fact, the very
first wells you drilled contain the information
you need to avoid those problems subsequently, okay?
So, that's sort of a philosophy underlying all of this.
And, and that's why, you know, we're going to have you actually build
a geomechanical model using the kinds of data that are routinely available.
So, the stresses are important.
Typically, and I'll talk about this a lot in the next lecture,
when we talk about the stress field, we're really talking about the
three principal stresses, which are normally acting in a vertical and horizontal
plane.
We refer to those stresses as Sv, the vertical stress, the overburden,
the maximum horizontal stress, and the minimum horizontal stress.
Three principal stresses. And then to orient that
we need one angle, which is the orientation of
the stresses in that horizontal plane, and that orientation
is usually the azimuth of the maximum horizontal stress.
So four parameters describe the stress field, and I'll
explain the theoretical basis for that in the next lecture.
You know, stress is a 2nd order tensor; it has 9 components;
it can be in any arbitrary coordinate system.
Six of those components are independent, but nonetheless, if
the stress field were really--if it took us, if
we needed six numbers and three orientations to describe
the stress field fully, we wouldn't be having this course.
Fortunately, for reasons I'll explain in the next
lecture, the problem is reduced quite a
bit and it's basically four values
that are needed to describe the stress field.
But, of course, we need to know the pore pressure;
we need to know the rock properties.
(and here we're referring to the rock strength, but we
often need other rock properties, obviously, for other applications).
And we need to know something about the fractures and the faults.
We can see larger faults with, you know, 3D seismic data.
And, with good data, we can see relatively small faults, but we don't see them all.
And we use image logs, which are now widely available, to look at the smaller-scale
fractures and faults, and we can actually sometimes
see faults of interest in core samples, etc.
And we're going to kind of combine all this in different ways
to solve a given problem as they arise.

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