Managing Sanding Risk in Sandstone Reservoir Through a New Constitutive Model

Sandstone reservoir failure during hydrocarbon production can cause negative impact on the oil/gas field development economics. Loss of integrity and hydrocarbon leakage due to downhole or surface erosion can decrease the risk of operational safety. Therefore, a proper understanding of the best formulation to manage and find the balance between productivity and sand risk is very important. Making decisions for the best and most economical completion design needs a full and proper sanding risk analysis driven by geomechanics modeling. The accuracy of modeling the reservoir rock mechanical behavior and the failure analysis depends on the selection of the constitutive model (failure criteria) specially to understand the failure and post failure mechanisms. Thus, an appropriate constitutive model/criterion is required as most of the current model/criteria are not developed for a weak rock material honoring the non-linearity and post failure (softening) process. Therefore, a new and novel elasto-plastic constitutive model for sandstone rock has been investigated and developed. The effort started with a sequence of triaxial tests at different confining pressures on core samples. Different types of rock have been tested during the developing and validation of the constitutive model. Comparison with other existing failure criteria was also performed. As the results, the newly developed constitutive model is better honoring the full spectrum of elasto-plastic rock mechanical behavior (softening and post-failure) which is important for oil and gas applications, specifically for sand production and drilling i.e. failure stabilization due to stress relief. The formulation and process are demonstrated with a case study for an old gas field, where a few gas wells have been shut-in due to severe sand production. The sand production predictive models have been validated with downhole pressure. The wells have been side-tracked and recompleted using the new sand failure prediction, using the new formulation resulted in restoring sand-free production at former rates. The novelty of this study would be in finding the right formula to best design the predictive model and to avoid any sand production when using the newly developed constitutive model.