Wellbore Cooling as a Means To Permanently Increase Fracture Gradient
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In recent years, several techniques have been proposed to increase the fracture gradient by inducing changes in the near wellbore region (Alberty and McLean, 2004; Sweatman, et al., 2004;Benaissa et al., 2005). This process, often called "wellbore strengthening", has most recently been implemented by adding specially designed proppant material to the mud before raising its pressure above the fracture gradient. The goal was to induce short tensile fractures in the vicinity of the wellbore wall which are prevented from propagating; thus, creating a "stress cage". However, this method has often proven ineffective in low permeability formations where mainly uncontrolled fracture propagation occurs. The purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate the use of wellbore cooling, in combination with more classical stengthening processes, to permanently increase the fracture gradient without the risk of circulation losses inherent in the "stress cage" method, as it is currently applied. This approach involves lowering the temperature of the drilling mud; thus, reducing the hoop stress at the borehole wall and then ‘setting’ the stress cage in the standard manner. Tensile cracks can then be induced at significant lower mud weights. Given the typical thermal conductivity properties of rocks,the tensile stresses induced by cooling (and consequently, the created fractures) will tend to be confined to the near wellbore region. This work presents an evaluation of the effect cooling has on the stress profile of a "solid" material and compares it with a fully coupled thermoporoelastic solution. The results of such analyses may then be used to design a field application to test this novel idea.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".