Abstract
Sand production treatment, control and mitigation generate high costs for the petroleum industry. Therefore, this is considered a critical problem and requires a continuous monitoring and special management. A sand production study is fundamental in field development and will help to eliminate or mitigate the related problems. This way, an analytical geomechanical sand production model is proposed to design the best field sand free production plan and to select the type of sand control measures and sand management techniques. The model needs as input data, the reservoir characteristicsn and a mechanical earth model derived from well logs that includes the stress state regime. It also requires the well direction, azimuth and completion information in order to evaluate the well characteristics. In this model an onset sand production condition is calculated looking for the borehole pressure that makes the maximum effective tangential compressive stress equal or higher than the rock strength (failure criteria), which is usually known as critical borehole pressure (CBHP). The results are presented on two kinds of graphs: the CBHP versus depth graph that allows determining the sand production free interval and the CBHP versus reservoir pressure graph that helps to design different well production plans for optimizing the recovered volume avoiding sand production. Results must be calibrated and verified with data field to simulate the real reservoir behavior. Briefly, for a specific well path it is possible to propose the operating CBHP as a function of the reservoir depletion and well completion (open or cased hole), also for a new well, it is possible to design the best well direction and the completion type, in addition to the operating CBHP to minimize sand production.
