Roles of Geomechanical Modeling During Hydrocarbon Exploration

Abstract Reservoir development from exploration to abandonment benefits from integrated geomechanical modeling to set guidelines and long-term operational strategies. Due to increasing operational challenges, geomechanics has become an essential part of the oil and gas industry’s daily route practice. These challenges arise when dealing with deep and tight, unconventional subsalt reservoirs, especially when drilling deviated or horizontal boreholes in a depleted formation in the minimum stress direction when intended to place multistage hydraulic fractures. This study provides innovative geomechanical solutions to address exploration challenges. This integrated approach will incorporate all available data to construct 3D geomechanical static models to assess and characterize the reservoir properties. These properties include reservoir quality index, sweet spot, reservoir compartmentalization, pore pressure prediction, in-situ stress regime, and presence of faults and fractures. The study will also investigate the relationship between in-situ stress, fractures, faults distributions, and fluid flow and correlate fracture properties variations to the lithology changes. The results from this study will be used as guidelines strategies for hydrocarbon exploration. The research will address the impact of the in-situ stress variations on petroleum systems, fault seal integrity evaluation, reservoir mapping, and heterogeneity. The study also provides an understanding of vertical and lateral variations of the in-situ stresses and their impact on well placement and well spacing. The types of geomechanical modeling implemented here can be used to accurately drill a safe and cost-effective wellbore that meets completion and stimulation requirements and maximize hydrocarbon production. Implementing this innovative geomechanical workflow addresses exploration challenges and plays an essential role during reservoir development to characterize the reservoirs and optimize operations. The studies showed that implementing this workflow improves reservoir developments by saving millions of dollars and minimizing the non-productive time during the planning and exploration phase.