Page 8 - Applied Petroleum Geomechanics

Preface

Although I took the course of Rock Mechanics (fundamentals of Geo-
mechanics) when I was an undergraduate, I did not really enjoy Rock
Mechanics until I was a Ph.D. student at the University of Oklahoma. This
was thanks to a very prestigious professor, Dr. J.-C. Roegiers, who taught
us Rock Mechanics. What attracted me to his class was not only his
fascinating teaching, but his humor and his unique tradition. That is, after
the end of course he invited his students to an all-you-can-drink bar:
drinking Rolling Rock, and forgetting about Mechanics; for a stressful
student, this was a big relaxation and enjoyment. After I took his three
courses, I found Rock Mechanics was a huge enjoyment, because it could
explain mechanisms in many difficult engineering problems. This led me to
choose Petroleum Geomechanics as my dissertation topic!
After I finished my Ph.D., I joined the research team of Dr. Hartmut
Spetzler, a very kind and knowledgeable professor, who once built and
tested the first polyaxial compression apparatus for rocks in the United
States. After 3 years of academic experience in his Colorado lab (certainly
including field tests in Arizona summers), I went back to the industry to
pursue my career in applying geomechanics to solve practical problems
encountered in the petroleum industry.
Conventional oil and gas reserves are becoming more difficult to be
found. Consequently, exploration and production have to go much deeper
into ultra-deepwater and ultra-deep formations, drill through long sections
of salt formations and complicated geological structures, access extremely
low permeable reservoirs (shale oil and shale gas, geothermal), and produce
in much more difficult formations. To successfully access these formations,
geomechanics plays a more important role, finds more applications, and has
become a key knowledge to guide exploration and production activities.
The applications include better understanding rock mechanical properties
and behaviors, estimating in situ stresses and pore pressures, analyzing
drilling mechanics, ensuring wellbore stability, and well integrity, stimu-
lating tight rocks (e.g., hydraulic fracturing), and mitigating sand production
and casing failures.
This book, Applied Petroleum Geomechanics, as the title suggests, aims
to apply geomechanics principles, theory, and knowledge to the petroleum
industry for solving practical problems. It provides a basis of geomechanics

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