We developed a hydraulic fracturing simulator by coupling a flow simulator to a geomechanics code, namely T+M simulator. Modeling of the vertical fracture development involves continuous updating of the boundary conditions and of the data connectivity, based on the finite element method for geomechanics. The T+M simulator can model the initial fracture development during the hydraulic fracturin...

Numerical Modeling of Thermal EOR: Comprehensive Coupling of an AMR-Based Model of Thermal Fluid Flow and Geomechanics — Modeling Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) can involve significant CPU (Central Processing Unit) time when both thermal fluid flow and geomechanics are coupled in order to take into account variations of permeability and porosity inside the reservoir due to stress change...

Direct modeling of geomechanics in reservoir simulation has gained a massive amount of interest in the last decade, due both to the increase in the available computing power and advances in numerical modeling, and to the importance of accurate representation of mechanical effects in many unconventional reservoirs. Both fully implicit and sequential implicit modeling approaches have been develop...

large amounts of hydrocarbon reserves are trapped in naturally fractured reservoirs which arechallenging in terms of accurate recovery prediction because of their joint fabric complexity andlithological heterogeneity. canada, for example, has over 400 billion barrels of crude oil in fracturedcarbonates in alberta, most of this being bitumen of viscosity greater than 106 cp in the grosmontformat...

Iterative solvers are of increasing interest in geomechanics with the move towards 3D finite element modelling. Potentially, these methods can lead to reduced computational complexity as, unlike direct methods, they do not require the full system matrix to be assembled. In general, however, iterative solvers have not been widely adopted in geomechanics due to problems with convergence. This pap...

The propagation of elastic waves in a fractured rock is investigated, both theoretically and numerically. Outside the fractures, the propagation of compressional waves is described in the simple framework of one-dimensional linear elastodynamics. The focus here is on the interactions between the waves and fractures: for this purpose, the mechanical behavior of the fractures is modeled using non...

Seismicity induced by fluid injection and withdrawal has emerged as a central element of the scientific discussion around subsurface technologies that tap into water and energy resources. Here we present the application of coupled flow-geomechanics simulation technology to the post mortem analysis of a sequence of damaging earthquakes (Mw= 6.0 and 5.8) in May 2012 near the Cavone oil field, in ...

Tunnel excavations in deep rocks provide stress perturbations which initiate diffuse and/or localized damage propagation in the material. This damage phenomenon can lead to significant irreversible deformations and changes in rock properties. In this paper, we propose to model such behavior by considering a micromechanically-based damage approach. The resulting micromechanical model, which also...