Abstract
Well drilling is considered the main activity to access oil reservoirs for oil production. Shear failure during drilling operation occurs when drilling mud pressure is reduced from a certain value known as critical or rupture pressure. Therefore, a proper drilling mud pressure is required to avoid the occurrence of any shear failure even to the smallest extent. This study aimed at achieving a criterion for estimating the minimum drilling mud pressure to prevent shear failure in oil wells. To this end, data on oil wells were first collected. Then oil wells were modeled at different drilling mud pressures with the help of finite difference numerical program, FLAC2D. The normalized yielded zone area (NYZA) in the elasto-plastic method was used for stability analysis and estimation of the minimum drilling mud pressure to prevent shear failure. After plotting the NYZA chart for each well, the minimum drilling mud pressure was calculated at NYZA = 1 and a correlation was then extracted by multivariate linear regression with the help of SPSS. This linear correlation is able to estimate the minimum drilling mud pressure to prevent shear failure taking into account the minimum and maximum horizontal stresses, pore pressure, internal friction angle and cohesion.
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