How borehole wall elasticity affects wellbore storage capacity in periodic hydraulic tests

Abstract

Characterizing fluid transport and pore pressure diffusion is key for monitoring and understanding many natural (e.g., seismically active zones and volcanic systems) and engineered environments (e.g., enhanced geothermal reservoirs and CO2 underground storage). Borehole hydraulic testing allows for inferring relevant properties of the probed subsurface volume, such as, for example, its transmissivity and diffusivity, assessing the governing flow regime as well as detecting the presence of hydraulic boundaries. Periodic hydraulic tests (PHT) achieve these objectives using an oscillatory fluid injection procedure while measuring the fluid pressure response in monitoring boreholes. The relevant information on the pressure diffusion process occurring in a probed formation is retrieved from the phase shifts and amplitude ratios between the flow rate and the interval pressure. In general, the interpretation of PHT data relies on the assumption that the pressure diffusion process is largely unaffected by the deformation of the probed rock volume. To assess this assumption, we present a conceptual PHT model based on the theory of poroelasticity to investigate the role played by hydromechanical coupling (HMC) effects during PHT and to assess whether and to what extent additional mechanical information can be extracted from these tests. These effects include the influence of the borehole wall deformation on the wellbore storage coefficient Sw, which quantifies the difference between the injected flow rates and those actually entering the porous formation. We show that, in homogeneous formations, the commonly taken approach based on the uncoupled diffusion solution for radial flow reproduces the results of our HMC model. However, neglecting the deformation effect of the borehole wall on the storage capacity of the system during injection can lead to underestimations of both transmissivity and diffusivity, particularly at shorter oscillation periods. We present analytical expressions for the borehole wall deformation contribution to Sw, which depends on the shear modulus and does not change with the oscillatory period. We show that it is possible to obtain the effective Sw along with the transmissivity and diffusivity using observations at various oscillatory periods. In the presence of hydraulic boundaries, such as no-flow or constant-pressure boundaries, at a given distance from the injection borehole, Sw becomes period-dependent, introducing apparent variations in the inferred shear modulus of the formation if the associated HMC effects are not accounted for. Our results thus highlight the importance of accounting for HMC effects in PHT data interpretation, not only to reliably and accurately characterize and monitor hydraulic properties but also to fully exploit the potential of PHT to provide additional information on the mechanical behaviour of the probed rock volume.