Near-wellbore fracture initiation and propagation induced by drilling fluid invasion during solid fluidization mining of submarine nature gas hydrate sediments

Drilling in a natural gas hydrate formation is challenging due to the poor consolidation of the formation and the potential evaporation of the hydrate.The unreasonable down-hole pressure of the drilling fluid can not only lead to the wellbore instability,but also change the predrilling condition of the natural gas hydrate formation,thus leading to an instable wellbore.In this paper,the integrated discrete element method(DEM)-computational fluid dynamics(CFD)work flow is developed to study the wellbore instability due to the penetration of the drilling fluid into the hydrate formation during crack propagations.The results show that the difference between in-situ stresses and overpressure directly affect the drilling fluid invasion behavior.The lower hydrate saturation leads to an easier generation of drilling fluid flow channels and the lower formation breakdown pressure.The breakdown pressure increases with the increase of hydrate saturation,this also indicates that hydrates can enhance the mechanical properties of the formation.The induced cracks are initially accompanied with higher pressure of the drilling fluid.According to the rose diagram of the fracture orientation,a wider orientation of the fracture distribution is observed at higher pressure of the invasion fluid.

Analytical method for evaluating stress field in casing-cement-formation system of oil/gas wells

In this paper, we present an analytical method for evaluating the stress field within a casing-cement-formation system of oil/gas wells under anisotropic in-situ stresses in the rock formation and uniform pressure within the casing. The present method treats the in-situ stresses in the formation as initial stresses since the in-situ stresses have already developed in the formation before placement of cement and casing into the well. It is demonstrated that, via this treatment, the present method excludes additional displacements within the formation predicted by the existing method, and gives more reasonable stress results. An actual tight-oil well is analyzed using the present and existing analytical methods, as well as the finite element method. Good agreement between the analytical results and the finite element analysis （FEA） results is obtained, validating the present method. It is also evident that, compared with the present method, the existing method overestimates the compressive stress level within the casing and the cement. Finally, the effects of elastic properties of the formation, cement, and inner pressure of casing on stresses within the casing and cement are illustrated with a series of sensitivity analyses.