Haiqing Wu

An Analytical Model for Assessing Stability of Pre-Existing Faults in Caprock Caused by Fluid Injection and Extraction in a Reservoir

Induced seismicity and fault reactivation associated with fluid injection and depletion were reported in hydrocarbon, geothermal, and waste fluid injection fields worldwide. Here, we establish an analytical model to assess fault reactivation surrounding a reservoir during fluid injection and extraction that considers the stress concentrations at the fault tips and the effects of fault length. In this model, induced stress analysis in a full-space under the plane strain condition is implemented based on Eshelby’s theory of inclusions in terms of a homogeneous, isotropic, and poroelastic medium. The stress intensity factor concept in linear elastic fracture mechanics is adopted as an instability criterion for pre-existing faults in surrounding rocks. To characterize the fault reactivation caused by fluid injection and extraction, we define a new index, the “fault reactivation factor” η, which can be interpreted as an index of fault stability in response to fluid pressure changes per unit within a reservoir resulting from injection or extraction. The critical fluid pressure change within a reservoir is also determined by the superposition principle using the in situ stress surrounding a fault. Our parameter sensitivity analyses show that the fault reactivation tendency is strongly sensitive to fault location, fault length, fault dip angle, and Poisson’s ratio of the surrounding rock. Our case study demonstrates that the proposed model focuses on the mechanical behavior of the whole fault, unlike the conventional methodologies. The proposed method can be applied to engineering cases related to injection and depletion within a reservoir owing to its efficient computational codes implementation.

Evaluating Reservoir Risks and Their Influencing Factors during CO2 Injection into Multilayered Reservoirs

Wellbore and site safety must be ensured during CO2 injection into multiple reservoirs during carbon capture and storage projects. This study focuses on multireservoir injection and investigates the characteristics of the flow-rate distribution and reservoir-risk evaluation as well as their unique influences on multireservoir injection. The results show that more CO2 enters the upper layers than the lower layers. With the increase in injection pressure, the risks of the upper reservoirs increase more dramatically than those of the low reservoirs, which can cause the critical reservoir (CR) to shift. The CO2 injection temperature has a similar effect on the injection flow rate but no effect on the CR’s location. Despite having no effect on the flow-rate distribution, the formation-fracturing pressures in the reservoirs determine which layer becomes the CR. As the thickness or permeability of a layer increases, the inflows exhibit upward and downward trends in this layer and the lower layers, respectively, whereas the inflows of the upper layers remain unchanged; meanwhile, the risks of the lower layer and those of the others decrease and remain constant, respectively. Compared to other parameters, the reservoir porosities have a negligible effect on the reservoir risks and flow-rate distributions.

Investigation on the Relationship between Wellhead Injection Pressure and Injection Rate for Practical Injection Control in CO2 Geological Storage Projects

The existing investigations on the maximum allowable wellhead injection pressure have found the upper limit of wellhead injection pressure, which, however, cannot provide a practical operational designing scheme of wellhead injection parameters for CO2 geological storage projects. Therefore, this work firstly proposes the complete constraint conditions of wellbore injection to realize the whole process of forward and inverse calculations of wellbore pressure and then applies it to explore the relationship between wellhead injection pressure and injection rate. The results show that the wellhead injection pressure and the injection rate are a pair of mutually constrained physical quantities. For a certain injection project, the allowable wellhead injection pressure and injection rate separately form a continuous interval. Change of one quantity within its allowable interval will also change the other within its interval, both jointly forming a closed region. Thus, controlling the wellhead injection parameters in this closed region can simultaneously ensure the effectiveness and safety of injection. Subsequently, this work further studies the factors of impacting the relationship between wellhead injection pressure and injection rate and finds that all the temperature of injected fluid, the parameters of saturation, and the characteristic parameters of reservoirs only change their upper and lower limits to some extent but have no essential effects on their relationship. Application of this theory and method in Shenhua CCS demonstration project obtained the relationship diagram of wellhead injection pressure and injection rate, which found that its actual injection parameters just fall into the closed region of the relationship diagram, effectively verifying the reliability of this work.