5/12/22, 17:53 Comparison of different failure criteria in prediction of safe mud weigh window in drilling practice - ScienceDirect

Earth-Science Reviews
Volume 136, September 2014, Pages 36-58

Comparison of different failure criteria in prediction of safe mud

weigh window in drilling practice
Shahoo Maleki a , Raoof Gholami b, Vamegh Rasouli c, Ali Moradzadeh e, 1, Reza Ghavami Riabi a, Farhad Sadaghzadeh d

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Abstract

Wellbore stability is one of the most significant problems observed during drilling practice. Determination
of safe mud weigh window is hence critically important in order to avoid instability problems. Mechanical
properties of formations along with magnitude and direction of ins-situ stress are necessary parameters for
evaluating the possibility. However, important role of an efficient failure criterion should never be
neglected. In this paper three failure criteria known as Mohr-Coulomb, Hoek-Brown and Mogi-Coulomb
were used for prediction of safe mud weigh window. Mechanical earth models were built using wireline
logs and to get a rational conclusion, three wellbores drilled in sandstone, carbonate and gas shale
reservoirs were taken into consideration. The results of this study indicated that Mohr-Coulomb criterion
underestimate the strength and estimates the highest minimum mud pressure required to stabilize the
wellbore. This is due to the fact that this criterion is linear and neglects the effect of intermediate stress.
The Hoek–Brown criterion on the other hand due to having a non-linear equation is able to provide better
estimation compared to that of the Mohr-Coulomb. However Mogi-Coulomb criterion is the best failure
criterion for determination of safe mud weight window and this is due mainly to considering the effect of
intermediate stress.

Introduction

Drilling instability problems due to insufficient knowledge of rocks properties may cause additional costs
or even loss of lives (Zhang et al., 2010). Due to being such significant matter, wellbore stability analysis are
done in various stages of well planning and development of a field (Fjaer et al., 2002, Rogers, 2002, Zhang et

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5/12/22, 17:53 Comparison of different failure criteria in prediction of safe mud weigh window in drilling practice - ScienceDirect

al., 2010). Conventionally, wellbore stability analysis starts by determination of strength parameter of
formations and estimation of in-situ stress. All of these parameters are then used in a failure criterion to
determine optimum mud pressure required to stabilize the wellbore. As a matter of fact, failure criteria are
used to predict borehole collapse and drilling induced fractures which are the main cause of having
instability. Hence if these two major instability problems can be predicted accurately, an optimum mud
weigh can be used to avoid any kinds of instability. Due to the accuracy required to predict borehole failure,
different failure criteria have been developed and used for wellbore stability analysis where most of them
neglect the effect of intermediate stress (Murrell, 1965, Hoek and Franklin, 1968, Mogi, 1971, Pan and
Hudson, 1988, Holt and Fjær, 1991). Although most of these methods have been indicated to have
applications in prediction of triaxial lab data, due to neglecting the effect of intermediate stress, they may
not be able to provide accurate results in estimations under poly axial or true-triaxial condition. Mohr-
Coulomb is one of the most conventionally used criteria in different application. This criterion however
neglects the effect of intermediate stress and is a linear equation in its nature. Due to these two reasons, it
is not able to predict rock strength accurately and as a result overestimates the minimum mud weight
required to avoid break-out to happen (McLean and Addis, 1990). Vernik and Zoback (1990) indicated the
low efficiency of Mohr–Coulomb criterion in estimation of breakout pressure and blame this criterion for
ignoring the effect of intermediate stress. Zhou (1994) pointed out that results presented by Mohr–
Coulomb criterion are worse than those obtained by true-triaxial criteria. Song and Haimson (1997)
recommended 3D criteria (i.e. those criteria which consider the effect of intermediate stress) rather than
2D criterion for prediction of breakout dimensions. Ewy (1999) introduced the Mohr-Coulomb criterion as
a too conservative method in prediction of break-out.

Hoek-Brown is another triaxial failure criterion which has been successfully involved in many civil, mining
and petroleum application (Cai, 2010). Despite the fact of being a 2D failure criterion, due to having a non-
linear nature, Hoek-Brown has been proven to be more accurate method compared to Mohr-Coulomb
(Zhang and Radha, 2010). However, results presented by 3D criterion are still much better than 2D criterion
due to considering the effect of intermediate stress (Al-Ajmi and Zimmerman, 2006). For instance Fjaer and
Ruistuen (2002) proved that intermediate stress has considerable influence on rock strength and those
criteria, which cannot consider this effect, are not often able to provide reasonable results. Thus many true-
triaxial criteria have been proposed in past decades (Drucker and Prager, 1952, Benz et al., 2008, Liu et al.,
2012). However, most of these criteria are mathematically unstable and have many parameters which
cannot simply be determined. For instance, criterion proposed by Mogi (1971) gives two values of σ1 for a
same value of σ2 (You, 2009). In 3D failure criterion proposed by Wiebols and Cook (1968) friction
coefficient between cracks surfaces should be known which is difficult to determine. Criterion proposed
developed by Desai and Salami (1987) requires more than six parameters to be determined. Generally, most
of these failure criteria require either determination of many parameters or numerical evaluation for
presenting accurate results.

In this paper application of a 3D failure criterion known as Mogi–Coulomb developed by Al-Ajmi and
Zimmerman (2005) is presented. This criterion is known to be a linear failure envelope in Mogi’s domain
and works by two parameters which are related to Coulomb strength parameters, cohesion and friction
angle. To show the efficiency of Mogi–Coulomb criterion, two conventional triaxial criteria namely Mohr–
Coulomb and Hoek-Brown criteria were also used. In addition, to compare the applications of these
criteria in any kinds of reservoirs, a sandstone and carbonate reservoirs of Iran and a gas shale reservoir of
Australia were taken into consideration.
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5/12/22, 17:53 Comparison of different failure criteria in prediction of safe mud weigh window in drilling practice - ScienceDirect

Section snippets

Geomechanical modeling

The use of mechanical earth model (MEM) has been well established in oil and gas industry. It is the
modeling of the earth’s mechanical properties coupled with the regional in-situ stress (Barton et al., 1988).
When applied correctly, the model can be used to understand how the earth will react when subjected to a
drilling scenario (Van Oort et al., 2001). It is well known that there are correlations between rock’s physical
properties obtained from petrophysical logs and its elastic and…

Constitutive models

Many constitutive models have been proposed during the past decades in order to calculate induced
stresses around the borehole due to drilling (Aadnoy, 1989). However borehole stresses are usually
determined using elastic solution developed by Kirsch (1898), or its generalized version for nonaligned
borehole proposed by Hiramatsu and Oka (1968) and Fairhurst, 1968, Fairhurst, 2003. According to these
equations, tangential, radial and axial stresses in any point around the wellbore wall can be…

Case studies

In this section, the data corresponding to three different wells are used to construct the MEM and
determine the stable mud weight windows using three different failure criteria introduced in the previous
sections. The first well, Well A is an offshore well, whereas the second well, Well B is an onshore well. Third
Well, Well C is located in one of the fields of Australia. Due to confidentiality purposes we are unable to
release the name of the field or wells. However, two of these wells are…

MEM construction for wells A, B and C

This section presents the results of the MEM construction for the three wells already presented in previous
section. Procedures explained in 2 Geomechanical modeling, 3 Constitutive models will be followed here
to estimate mechanical properties as well as state of stresses for each field based on the log data and
available information of each well. At the end applications of those three failure criteria are presented for
each well in different reservoirs to see which one of the failure criteria …

Conclusions

In this paper application of three failure criteria in estimation of safe mud weight window was presented
and compared to each other. Using the wireline logs of three wellbores drilled in sandstone, carbonate and
gas shale formations, it was concluded that minimum mud pressures predicted by Mogi-Coulomb is more
conservative than that of the Hoek-Brown criteria due to being a linear equation and neglecting the effect
of intermediate stress. Hence, Hoek-Brown will be better option comparing to…

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5/12/22, 17:53 Comparison of different failure criteria in prediction of safe mud weigh window in drilling practice - ScienceDirect

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1
Currently at Faculty of Mining, Petroleum & Geophysics, Shahrood University, Shahrood, Iran

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