In the oil and gas exploitation or geo-thermal energy exploitation industries, wellbores can be drilled at great depths where the formation would be hot and saturated. In such case, a large temperature difference between the rock mass and drilling fluid can occur and cannot be ignored. During drilling the wellbores, thermic, hydraulic and mechanical phenomena appear simultaneously and interact with each other within the rock. This study presents the analysis of stress state around the wellbore located in saturated hot rock based on the fully thermo-hydro-mechanical behavior model of the rock mass by the finite element method. Two scenarios involving thermal conditions at the well wall are taken into account, i.e. the drilling fluid temperature is lower or higher than the formation temperature so-called the cases of “cooling” and “heating”, respectively. In this study, the influence of some thermic, hydraulic and initial stress field parameters of the rock mass on the stress state around the wellbore was also clarified. The obtained results showed that, in the cooling case, the well wall may be destabilized by fracture failure while in the heating case this would be collapse failure. The maximum points of tangential and axial stresses appear at the same locations for the two scenarios. In addition, the thermal expansion coefficient, the initial shear stress in the rock mass greatly affect the stress state around the wellbore whilst the permeability of the formation does not influence on the stresses on the well wall but only on the stresses inside the surrounding formation.
Wellbores are usually located in saturated geological layers. The determination of pore water pressure field around the wellbore is necessary during the design calculation and drilling stages. This paper presents analytical approach to determine the pore water pressure field around a horizontal wellbore at deep geological layer that exhibits heterogeneous, isotropic or transversely isotropic behavior. Thus, the wellbore is considered to be in an infinite medium. The pore water pressure at the well wall, equal to the drilling mud pressure, together with the pore water pressure at infinity is assumed to be constant. The closed-form solutions are based on the theory of fluid transport in porous medium and the conformal mapping technique of the complex variable method. The closed-form solutions are established with the condition of transient fluid flow for the case of isotropic medium and with the condition of steady state fluid flow for the case of transversely isotropic medium. The accuracy of the closed-form solutions is validated by numerical solutions based on the finite element method. The obtained solutions can be used as tools to determine quickly and accurately the pore pressure field around the horizontal wellbore, which serves to evaluate the stability of the well wall in preliminary design of the wellbore, as well as the amount of water inflow into it. Furthermore, the closed-form solutions are also considered as reference solutions to evaluate the accuracy and reliability of numerical models.
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