Abstract
Drilling in deepwater is becoming more and more expensive. There is need to know before hand, for well planning purposes, the values of the fracture pressure. The Fracture pressure could be determined by predictive or verificative methods. Many correlations exists that can be used to predict the fracture pressure. However, they are mostly limited to onshore and shallow water fields. There is therefore the need to develop correlations that can reliably predict the fracture pressure for deep water fields.
This paper explores the concept of developing and possibly modifying some existing correlations to suit deep offshore needs as well as develop an Excel Spreadsheet and a V-Basic program that can be used to predict fracture pressure for deep offshore fields both in the Niger Delta region and the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, the predicted fracture gradient (LOT) values yielded by the various correlations were compared with actual LOT from a particular deep offshore field in the Niger Delta and the results analyzed.
The results of the analysis showed that some of the correlations studied, especially Matthew & Kelly, can be used to reliably predict the facture gradient for deep offshore fields.
