Abstract
Ensuring wellbore integrity is the most important factor in injection well design. The water alternating gas (WAG) injection is increasingly applied globally as the effective enhanced oil recovery (EOR) method in oil wells. High injection pressure or low injection temperature could lead to compressive wellbore failure. The rock stress around the wellbore is a function of the wellbore fluid flow and it should be precisely determined to avoid the wellbore failure. The purpose of this study is to propose a method to ensure the stability of the wellbore for the WAG process using iterative coupling method. The parameters of pressures, temperature, saturations and stresses are obtained for the multiphase flow condition using mathematical modeling. In this study, finite difference method is used to solve pressure, temperature and saturations; and finite volume method is acquired to solve the rock stresses. Iterative coupling method is employed to improve the accuracy of the results. This study introduces improved iterative coupling method between flow and stress models to reduce the processing time of obtaining corrected stress and failure results. Wellbore stability model is developed to determine the maximum pressure values, which lead to wellbore failure in WAG injection process for some different boundary conditions.
Highlights
Rocks are a combination of different materials
The rock stress around the wellbore is a function of the wellbore fluid flow and it should be precisely determined to avoid the wellbore failure
The purpose of this study is to propose a method to ensure the stability of the wellbore for the water alternating gas (WAG) process using iterative coupling method
Summary
Rocks are a combination of different materials. The amount of the stress indexed by pore pressure depends on pore content. The study of stress in a two-phase medium and in void space is essential for well integrity in oil production. The study of temperature is important in defining the stress. The theory of thermo-poroelasticity or porothermoelasticity is developed by combining the influence of thermal stress and the difference between solid and fluid expansion (Espinoza 1983; Fredrich et al 2000; Zare 2012)
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