Stability analysis of a vertical wellbore in one of Iran's South-West oilfields using the plastic zone concept

During drilling operation, a volume of formation rocks which have been effected by far field stress is removed. Thus induced stress field redistributes around the borehole wall. While this induced stress field exceeds the resistance of the rocks around borehole wall, borehole breakout will take place. As a result a plastic zone around borehole wall can be observed. Hence, accurate understanding of state of plastic zone around the borehole wall can lead to figure out the behavior of the borehole circumferential environment. The analysis plastic zone around the borehole wall is valuable to determine safe mud window and optimize well trajectory to mitigate well instability problems. On the other hand, analysis the wellbore stability based on the critical pressure may be unreasonable, because the critical pressure can only reflect the degree of difficulty for the initiation of damage at the wellbore rather than the extent of the wellbore damage. Therefore, the results of wellbore stability analysis based on the analysis of plastic zone around the borehole wall are more realistic. In this study, using an elasto-plastic analysis incorporating three commonly used failure criteria as Mohr-Coulomb, Mogi-Coulomb and modified Lade, the extent of plastic zone around a vertical oil well and the condition of stability with specific mud weight in southwest of Iran was investigated. Results showed that according to the Mogi-Coulomb and modified Lade failure criteria which have been confirmed by FMI data the probability of occurrence of plastic zone around the borehole wall was negligible and borehole was in the stable condition. On the other hand, the discrepancy between the results of Mohr-Coulomb criterion and the set of modified Lade and Mogi-Coulomb criteria can be due to the negligence of the effect of averaged main stress.