Experimental and Numerical Studies on Mudstone's Creep Behavior During Water Injection and Its Effect on Casing Damage

Abstract

During the process of water injection production in oilfield, when water cuts into the mudstone, as a result, large numbers of casings are damaged because of mudstone's creep characteristic. In order to analyze this phenomenon, the uniaxial compression experiments and creep experiments of mudstone from Daqing Oil Field under different saturation conditions were done, it was studied that how the mudstone's mechanical parameters and creep characteristic would change with the increment of water contents. The results indicate that the rock strength and elastic modulus are decreased rapidly with the increment of water contents, on the other hand, the creep strain and steady state creep strain rate are increased with the increment of water contents, and also the steady state creep strain rate is enhanced with the increment of deviatoric stress. Through the creep characteristic curves, a nonlinear creeping constitutive equation of mudstone considering the changes of water contents was established. In the deep stratum of the oilfield, the calculation model of casing‐cement sheath‐mudstone was built, based on the experiment results of mudstone and its creep constitutive equation, mudstone's creep pressure with time under different water contents was simulated. The simulation results show that the increasing water content accelerates the incremental rate of the creep pressure of mudstone, so the time of reaching yield state of casing will descend greatly, which means service time of casing becomes much shorter.