HR: 1340h
AN: T23B-0582    [Abstracts]
TI: Mechanics of a contracting reservoir in an elastic half-space with an intervening visco-elasto-plastic layer
AU: * Mossop, A
EM: apmosso@sandia.gov
AF: Sandia National Laboratories, P.O. Box 5800 MS 0750, Albuquerque, NM 87185 United States
AU: Fredrich, J T
EM: fredrich@sandia.gov
AF: Sandia National Laboratories, P.O. Box 5800 MS 0750, Albuquerque, NM 87185 United States
AB: The extraction of fluids from porous rocks within the Earth's crust leads to localised volume strains. These in turn induce stress changes and displacements in the surrounding rock mass. The relationships between these processes are governed by the constitutive properties of the rocks. For the case of a poroelastic fluid reservoir in a linear-elastic matrix the mechanics are relatively well known and understood. In this study we extend these models by investigating the case of a contracting rock body (caused by declining pore pressure) embedded within a linear-elastic half space, but with the addition of a visco-elasto-plastic layer between the contracting reservoir and the free surface. The problem is of growing importance as the exploitation of hydrocarbon reservoirs beneath salt bodies occurs at ever greater depths in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. This is because the creep properties of salt are strongly temperature dependent, so that as depths increase, and hence ambient temperatures, creep can occur at a rate that is impossible to ignore over the reservoir lifecycle. The models are explored using a finite element approach and make use of sophisticated salt constitutive models and large-deformation three-dimensional geomechanical simulation codes; the reservoir deformations are governed by either poro-elastic or cap plasticity constitutive laws. However, a general behaviour pattern can be observed: the visco-elasto-plastic salt layer tends to decouple the deformation fields from the free surface with stress and displacements accentuated below the salt. The magnitude of the increased horizontal displacements below the salt layer are relatively independent of the layer thickness. The accentuated vertical displacements though are more strongly dependent on the thickness of the salt layer. This work was performed at Sandia National Laboratories funded by the US DOE under Contract DE-AC04-94AL85000. Sandia is a multiprogam laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the United States Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
DE: 8159 Rheology--crust and lithosphere
DE: 8164 Stresses--crust and lithosphere
SC: Tectonophysics [T]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting