Abstract
With recent advances in drilling technology, directional drilling in deep and highly fractured formation has received considerable attention concerning the stability of the wellbore. The majority of the existing wellbore stability predictions are based on the solutions obtained using single-porosity elastic or poromechanics theory which considers rock formations to be homogenous with one degree of porosity distribution. However, the solutions may fall short when the rock formation is also fractured. The dominant characteristics of fractured rock formations, i.e., the coupling between various induced hydro-mechanical processes and interporosity flow can be well represented under the realm of dual-porosity poromechanics. Due to the complexity of the physical phenomena and mathematical formulations associated with a dual-porosity system, to date the solution for industry field applications e.g. mudweight estimation, pore pressure and stress distribution in wellbore drilling in fractured formations does not exist. This paper aims at using a consistent dual-porosity poromechanics and/or poroelastic analytical model to analyze wellbore stability in naturally fractured rock formations.
