Engineering Commons^™

An Improved Foam Modeling Technique And Its Application To Petroleum Drilling And Production Practice, Yanfang Wang

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Foam is one of the most common used multiphase fluid in Underbalanced Drilling (UBD) and Managed Pressure Drilling (MPD). Because of its low density, high capacity of lifting and carrying cuttings, low cost and compatibility with formations, foam has become more superior than the conventional drilling mud when depleted reservoir pressure, severe lost circulation, or unstable borehole are encountered. In general, the success of foam applications rely on the understanding of the fundamentals of foam rheology in downhole conditions.

Foam rheology has been studied for decades. Conventional foam rheological models such as Power Law, Bingham Plastic, Herschel-Bulkley to explain foam …

Fluid-Driven Fracture Initiation From Oil And Gas Wells Considering Lifetime Stresses, Andreas Michael

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Fluid-driven fracture initiation from oil and gas wells is examined in detail. The dissertation covers three subtopics: drilling, completion (stimulations), and post-blowout capping-induced fracture initiation.

Drilling-induced tensile fractures (DITFs) are located in an azimuth orthogonal to wellbore breakouts and are observed from image logs obtained during drilling operations. Fully analytical criteria for the orientation of DITFs initiating from wells in porous, permeable media are derived considering fluid infiltration from a pressurized wellbore. DITF orientation (longitudinal or transverse-to-the-wellbore) is used to constrain the magnitude of the local maximum horizontal principal stress. The range of the possible stress states is indicated on …

Pressure Monitoring For Subsurface Leakage Characterization, Mojtaba Mosaheb

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Undesirable leakage from underground sedimentary formations is a matter of considerable concern due to implications for water resources contamination and greenhouse gas emissions. Leakage in underground formations can remain undetected for a long period. Pressure monitoring is a dynamic method that can be used for leakage detection and characterization. The pressure signals are affected by the hydraulic characteristics of the reservoir media and leakage pathways. Consequently, the pressure data can be interpreted to obtain information about the hydraulic characteristics of the system. Pressure interpretation is useful for early leakage detection, because the pressure signals travel fast in reservoir media. In …

Data-Driven Modeling And Prediction For Reservoir Characterization And Simulation Using Seismic And Petrophysical Data Analyses, Xu Zhou

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This study explores the application of data-driven modeling and prediction in reservoir characterization and simulation using seismic and petrophysical data analyses. Different aspects of the application of data-driven modeling methods are studied, which include rock facies classification, seismic attribute analyses, petrophysical properties prediction, seismic facies segmentation, and reservoir dimension reduction.

The application of using petrophysical well logs to predict rock facies is explored using different data analytics methods including decision tree, random forest, support vector machine and neural network. Different models are trained from a set of well logs and pre-interpreted rock facies data. Among the compared methods, the random …

Investigation Of Tracer-Surfactant-Foam Processes In Shallow Subsurface Environmental Remediation: History-Matching And Performance Prediction, Hazem Fleifel

LSU Master's Theses

In-situ subsurface remediation has been widely used as an efficient means of cleaning up non-aqueous phase liquid (NAPL) from contaminated soils and aquifer. The use of tracer, surfactant, and foam are often considered to keep track of the propagation of injected fluids in the medium, dissolve and mobilize contaminants trapped by capillary forces, and overcome the level of heterogeneity and improve displacement and sweep efficiencies.

This study shows an actual remediation process to reduce NAPL within a military base in South Korea, by injecting tracer and surfactant solutions together for a duration of 10 days. The site consists of 5 …

Experimental Evaluation Of How Mineralogy And Microstructure Impact Micro-Geomechanics Of Shale Rocks, Hui Du

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Shales play an essential role in petroleum exploration and production because they can occur either as unconventional reservoir rocks for hydrocarbon extraction via hydraulic fracturing or as caprocks for conventional reservoirs and subsurface gas/ waste storage. For both extraction and storage applications, the success rate is directly depending on the rigorous candidate selection. Conventional rock characterization techniques normally measure rock properties by seismic/logging at the reservoir scale, and on drilled/outcrop cores at the core scale. However, shales are highly heterogeneous in composition, containing a large number of reactive minerals in micro/nanoscale with significantly different properties. The structural features and properties …

The Desorption Kinetics Of Methane From Nonaqueous Fluids For Enhanced Well Control, James Lee Nielsen Jr.

LSU Master's Theses

The mass transfer of a dissolved gas evolving to return to the gaseous phase from a liquid is governed by many parameters. This process affects the development of an oil and gas well due to the possibility of gas contamination occurring from either an influx entering the wellbore, or drilling through gas-bearing formations. Once this dissolved hydrocarbon gas circulates up the wellbore, it will begin to evolve from solution and poses a potential risk to drilling equipment, the environment, and personnel at a drilling rig. Being able to predict the behavior of gas desorption based on a known set of …