AAbstAbstract:

About the beginning of the eighties, rock mechanics was restrict to a few subjects in Petroleum industries, such as hydraulic fracture, bit performance and sanding prediction. Nowadays, rock mechanics continues as an auxiliary branch of petroleum industry, but it is present in geology, drilling, completion and reservoir management daily activities.
During this period geologists and engineers have realized that the in situ stresses and its modification, due to drilling/completion and production operations, could have a strong impact on well drilling and producing. On the other hand, they also realized that the determination of rock deformability and strength is a challenging issue. Therefore several methods were developed, and others were improved, in order to measure these properties.
Nowadays many activities are withstood by rock mechanics, such as: welbore stability, surface subsidence, reservoir compaction, damage to casings and screens due to underneath formation movement caused by reservoir fluid withdraw, fault activation connecting isolated layers or causing oil/gas to reach the surface or mudline, leading to serious environmental problems.
Rock Mechanics deals with structural problems, therefore one need to know the original stress state, rock properties, geometry (layers and discontinuities) and boundary conditions. More recently this set of parameters has been named “Mechanical Earth Model” – MEM. A keyword to build a MEM is multidisciplinary teams. These teams basically should be formed by geologists, geophysists and engineers and must be trained in order to diminish the uncertainties of the final MEM.
This lecture will present the state of art of field and lab tests to determine stress and rock mechanics parameters, and also simulations involving drilling and completion problems related to rock mechanics.


Biography:

F. H. Ferreira has been working for Petrobras since 1985. During this time he supervised offshore Workover activities. Since 1988 he has worked at Petrobras` Research Center in Rio de Janeiro and has been involved in wellbore stability, hydraulic fracture design, sanding prediction, in situ stress determination, rock parameters determination. Currently he is Petrobras Rock Mechanics Lab supervisor.
He holds an MS degree at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro– PUC-RIO and he is attending to a PhD course of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – UFRJ.