Numerical Simulations of Drilling Mud Invasion into the Marine Gas Hydrate-Bearing Sediments

Abstract

When drilling through the oceanic gas hydrate-bearing sediments, the water-based mud under overbalanced drilling condition will invade into the borehole sediments. The invasion behavior can influence the hydrate stability, wellbore stability and well logging evaluation. In this work, we performed the numerical simulations to study the effects of density (i.e., corresponding pressure), temperature and salinity of mud on the mud invasion and hydrate stability around borehole. The results show that the mud invasion will promote greatly the hydrate dissociation near wellbore sediments if the temperature of mud is higher than that of hydrate stability. Under certain conditions, the higher mud density, temperature and salinity, the greater degree of mud invasion and heat transfer, and the more hydrate dissociation. The gas produced from hydrate dissociation can reform hydrates again in the sediments, and even the hydrate saturation is higher than that in situ sediments due to the displacing effect of the mud invasion, which forms a high-saturation hydrate girdle band around the borehole.