Petroleum Geomechanical Engineering in Field Development Planning for Compressional Environments

The application of geomechanics to oil and gas field development leads to significant improvements in the economic performance of the asset. The geomechanical issues which impact field development start at the exploration stage and continue to affect appraisal and development decisions all the way through to field abandonment. Field developments now use improved static reservoir characterization, which includes both the mechanical properties of the field and the initial stress distribution over the field, along with numerical reservoir modeling to assess the dynamic stress evolution that accompanies oil and gas production, or fluid injection, into the reservoirs.Characterising large volumes of rock in the sub-surface is accompanied by uncertainty, due to the low core sampling rates of around 1 part per trillion for geomechanical properties, and the remote geophysical & petrophysical techniques used to construct field models. However, some uncertainties also result from theoretical simplifications of the geology.This paper provides a brief overview of geomechanical engineering applied to petroleum field developments, using a case study of the stress regimes present in active fault systems, and re-evaluates the industry’s interpretation of Andersonian stress states of faulting.