The Critical Roles of Geomechanical Modeling During Exploration Phase

Abstract

Abstract Geomechanics has become an essential part of the petroleum industry's daily routine due to the increase in operational challenges when dealing with deep, tight, unconventional, and subsalt reservoirs, in addition to depleted zones and multilateral drilling in the direction of minimum stress. This research aims to provide innovative integrated geomechanical solutions during the exploration phase and investigate the relationship between in-situ stress, fractures, faults distributions, and fluid flow to correlate fracture variations to lithology changes. This integrated approach will incorporate all available field data, including seismic velocities, petrophysical well logs, geological, and structural models that will be used to construct 3D geomechanical static models to assess and characterize the reservoir properties, such as reservoir quality index (RQI), sweet spot, reservoir compartmentalizations, pore pressure, in-situ stress regime, and presence of faults and fractures. The fracture properties and dynamic simulation will be conducted by studying the fracture properties from the core sample, image log interpretation, and fluid flow using Finite Element models The results from this study will be used as a guideline during the field exploration phase to set the field development strategies and answer the question such as: How stress field variations will impact petroleum systems, fault seal integrity assessment, reservoir mapping, and heterogeneity, in-situ stress vertical and lateral variations and their impact on well placement and well spacing, and what types of geomechanical modeling that can be used to accurately drill a save and cost-effective wellbore to meet completion and stimulation requirements that maximize hydrocarbon production. The studies showed that implementing this workflow has a huge business impact on reservoir developments by saving millions of dollars and minimized nonproductive time during planning and field development. This workflow is special in a way that it will be calibrated and updated when acquiring new data at the exploration stage and througout the well life to yield better results.