Benefits
- Improves well drilling and completions planning
- Informs mitigation plans to minimize risk and impacts of sand production
- Predicts wellbore and casing integrity
Applications
- Sand production prediction
- Hydraulic fracturing design
- Caprock integrity and fault reactivation
- Critically stressed fracture/fault analysis (fracture permeability and fault reactivation)
- Reservoir compaction/surface subsidence
- Salt creep assessment
- Multilateral junction stability evaluation
- Casing Integrity/completion stability analysis
Overview
As your producing wells mature, the resulting pressure declines can significantly alter your reservoir's stress field and production profile.
GaffneyCline™ energy advisory’s dynamic 3D/4D finite element (FE) modeling provides detailed insights into how your structure’s stress field responds to long-term depletion. To realistically model the time-dependent behavior of your reservoir’s stress field, we couple a 3D static geomechanical model with corresponding reservoir simulation results.
Because the position and stresses acting on all existing blocks influence each other, our workflow models the entire reservoir and field as one FE mesh. Any faults in the 3D structural and reservoir model will be reflected in the FE mesh’s geometry.
The workflow also allocates each node of the FE mesh with a distinct density, pore pressure, and mechanical properties taken from the structural grid. This ensures that lateral and vertical variations of these parameters are realistically transferred into the FE model.
The model outputs and analysis enable you to:
- Identify faults that divide or compartmentalize the reservoir, or that might be penetrated by planned wells.
- Understand the impacts of faults interacting with the reservoir and their likelihood of becoming mechanically activated over time.
- Run multiple depletion scenarios to Investigate the impact on block-bounding faults.
- Identify risks of boundary fault reactivation during field production.
- Investigate other time-dependent effects on pressure depletion, including compaction, subsidence, and sand production.
Contact your Baker Hughes representative to learn how to optimize well plans in high-fault reservoirs with GaffneyCline energy advisory’s 4D geomechanics/reservoir model coupling.
