A semi-analytic solution of a wellbore in a non-isothermal low-permeability porous medium under non-hydrostatic stresses

Abstract

The transient stress, displacement, pore pressure and temperature fields around a wellbore in a thermo-poro-elastic (THM) medium subject to non-hydrostatic remote stresses are analyzed under non-isothermal plane-strain conditions. The linear THM model proposed by Coussy (1989) is adopted in the analysis with a focus on thermal effects in low-permeability saturated rocks, characterized by a latent heat associated with local changes of fluid mass content. Non-dimensionalized parameters are identified by reformulating the fully-coupled governing equations and boundary conditions. The wellbore problem is simplified by decomposing it into axisymmetric and deviatoric loading cases. The corresponding analytical solutions are obtained in Laplace space. The inverse Laplace transforms are performed numerically to find the time-dependent distributions of field variables in the rock mass around the wellbore. These numerical results show that although the pore pressure diffusion has little influence on temperature and stress, temperature changes can strongly affect the pore pressure and stress around the wellbore. The temperature change can lead to changes in near-well stresses and the resulting significant change in wellbore breakdown pressure illustrates the importance of considering the THM coupling.