UNIT 1.

3: OVERVIEW OF UNITS 4-8

UNIT 4: BASIC CONSTITUTIVE LAWS
 Basic constitutive laws. Now this is not a course in elasticity or material properties, but we need
to recognize that rocks are complicated.

 And some rocks like this strong carbonate sample which is being deformed, a cylindrical sample
being deformed by an axial load in the laboratory. We see a little bit of inelastic or nonlinear
behaviour, as you first begin to apply a load to it, the cracks start closing. Then we see a long
range of elastic behaviour. And then eventually, as we get close to the strength of the rock, the
rock begins to fail, and ultimately, it fails. And so, you know, this rock is pretty elastic, right? It's
pretty linear, and it's pretty good. But that's, you know, that's just sort of one endmember.

 And we can derive various constitutive laws to describe these kinds of behaviour.
 So, I just showed you a fairly realistic strong rock which might be idealized as a linear elastic
simple system. And that might be good enough for some problems for those kinds of rocks.
However, when you introduce pore fluid into a rock, suddenly everything becomes more
complicated.
 For example, the pore fluid in a porous sedimentary rock has the capability of supporting the
externally applied stresses, when those stresses are applied quickly with respect to the
permeability. In other words, think about a tennis ball which has got a little pin hole in it. And
you've somehow filled up that tennis ball with water. If you deform that tennis ball slowly the
water just sort of squirts out, and the tennis ball is not very strong. If someone actually threw
that tennis ball against a wall, when it hit the wall, it'd be like throwing a rock against the wall,
because the pore fluid pressure, right, the pore fluid pressure would go up fast. It can't get out,
 because of that tiny little pinhole, and therefore the stiffness of that tennis ball is greatly
increased.
 So now the elastic modulus, the stiffness, depends on the rate at which it's being loaded. And so
if you load a sample fast, it appears very stiff and strong. If you load it slowly, it appears very
compliant. Or, if you're passing seismic waves through the rock, high frequency waves would see
a very stiff rock, and very low frequency waves would see a very soft rock. And this is called
dispersion, the fact that waves of different frequencies will see different velocities or be
sensitive to different elastic moduli.
 And so we go from a simple linear elastic system, the minute we add pore fluids, life becomes a
lot more complicated.

 In an elastic plastic rock, which can be conceptualized by a spring pulling a block, the relationship
between displacement and force will go up linearly. The slope will be the spring constant. But at
some point, that block will start to slide. And then, you get lots of displacement at a constant
force, okay? So, it's elastic and then it's plastic, okay?
 Lots of irreversible deformation, because if you back off that force, right, the block doesn't slide
backwards, you still have this, you know, permanent deformation, so it's elastic plastic.
 And we actually see that in kind of softer rocks. You begin to deform them; they start to deform.
So you deform them a bit, then you unload them in the lab and you you'll have a net a net force
that's left behind.
 And finally, you've got a viscoelastic or viscoplastic rock, these are rocks which, which the rock
intrinsically, outside the role of pore fluid pressure, okay, this rock could be dry, but intrinsically,
its deformation is time dependent. And this actually turns out to be very, very important in a
wide variety of materials, and we'll spend some time talking about viscoelastic and viscoplastic
properties.
 So, as we describe rock behavior mechanically, it's sometimes going to be okay to use simple
elastic models or the rock is elastic to the point of failure. And once it starts to fail, obviously it's
inelastic, okay, and that's not going to be a bad assumption. And in other cases, we're going to
be very, very cognizant of the fact that the rate at which the rock is loading is going to be very
important in determining how the rock responds.
UNIT 5: ROCK STRENGTH
 Rock strength you know, many decades of laboratory research have been done, and we can
describe strength in many different ways.
 Compression strength not only what it is, how we describe it, what laws we use. What strength
anisotropy is, obviously flaws in rock, you think of bedding planes and shale, right? Make shales
intrinsically this makes the strength of shales intrinsically anisotropic.
 Compaction, rocks failing under kind of, kind of a mean, effective confining stress. You might
think about it as a rock just compacting as it's being buried during burial and diagenesis. Or the
fact that a weak rock is stable, but when you start producing the fluids, the effective stress goes
up, and then the rock begins to compact.
 And the third mode of failure that's important, of course, is the tensile strength of rock. While
the tensile strength is very low and is typically negligible, we want to talk about hydraulic
fracture propagation. And we want to keep tensile strength in, in in our minds because of that.

UNIT 6: FAULT FRICTION AND CRUSTAL STRENGTH

 Another thing we talk about is shear strength, the strength of faults. And this is important
whether we're trying to understand how to predict whether a fault will slip, for example if we're
injecting fluid or we're somehow changing the stress field, is a fault going to slip?
 But it's also of first order importance in understanding stress magnitudes in the crust. Now, if we
think about the forces in the crust in a geological context, right, plates are moving. Geologic
processes are active. Stresses are being transmitted through the interiors of continents. Those
stresses can accumulate. But they can't accumulate beyond the strength of pre-existing faults in
the crust. And when we have pre-existing faults in the crust, the stresses that are arising over,
you know, geologic time will suddenly stop increasing, because those faults will start sliding.
 So, this concept of understanding shear deformation on pre-existing faults is going to be very
important at a reservoir scale, for understanding the faults in the reservoir. When we start
talking about the problem of triggered seismicity, they're going to be very important. And
they're going to be of first order of importance and when we, you know, first start talking about
what are the stresses in the earth, what are the stress magnitudes, we have to recognize that
geologically the earth's crust is in a state in many places of sort of failure equilibrium.
 And whether it is or not, the strength of pre-existing faults is always going to limit the
magnitudes of stresses that exist. So, these are very important principals that are discussed in
the latter part of chapter four.
 That's what I illustrate here, where I take that same diagram I showed you before, but we can,
we will derive some simple formulas.
 And we will demonstrate that in a normal faulting situation, you know, even though we know
that the minimum stress is greater than the pore pressure, it's less than the vertical stress, it can
only go so low, right? That red dash line represents the minimum value of Shmin because if it
gets any lower, normal faults will start to start to move. So now we've really, you know, we've
really established a range of stress magnitudes at a given depth, knowing that it's normal
faulting, knowing what the pore pressure is, and knowing that not all values of stress are
allowable, because the Earth just can't hold all values of stress. In a normal faulting
environment, there's a lower limit on the magnitude of the least horizontal stress.
 Similarly, in a strike-slip faulting environment, if we know the value of the minimum horizontal
stress, we can say what the upper bound of the maximum horizontal stress is. So, the anisotropy
between the two horizontal stresses is bounded by the strength of the crust.
 In a reverse faulting regime, the bound on Shmax is really quite high, and we can get very, very
large stresses in situ. And in the cases, we will be working on pure reverse faulting is relatively
rare. But nonetheless understanding that the faulted crust provides a fundamental constraint on
stress magnitudes will give us a very important conceptual tool to build stress models and when
we don't have perfect information to at least put some bounds.
 We can say, okay, well we don't know what Shmax is exactly, but we know it can't be any larger
than a given value. And Shmax is by definition always going to be larger than Shmin. And it can't,
if we know SHmin, which we typically get, excuse me, which we typically get from hydraulic
 fracturing, we know Shmax's lower bound, and we know Shmax's upper bound. And, for
example, if you're working on a problem of wellbore stability or fault slip, you could just
investigate both or those bounds. while you don't have precise information, you got bounds to
work work under, quantitative bounds.

UNIT 7: FAULTS AND FRACTURES

 Faults and fractures are important because the Earth comes to you with a lot of baggage, tens of
millions or hundreds of millions of years of deformation.
 There are many fractures and faults that have been introduced over geologic time.
 Now in the current stress field, or the stress field that existed at the time fractures and faults
were active, you can relate, and we will talk about this, the stress state to the orientation of the
fractures and faults that are of most importance, okay?
 So, if we go through geologic time and as different processes occur, we could try to in fact
reinvent the distributional fractures and faults that we see. Or fortunately this is the case, we
can say, okay, we know there are a lot of fractures and faults, but we know that today, we have
a strike-slip faulting regime.
 And so what we know is that despite what's in the rock, we know which subsets of the faults,
which in this case would be near vertical faults, which are kind of conjugate around the direction
of maximum horizontal stress, about 30 degrees either way, we know which faults are
potentially active in today's stress field, okay?
 So, we're going to go through that, trying to understand the difference between what's in the
rock and what's been inherited over time, to what subset of those faults are the ones that are
potentially active today, right?
 We're interested in that because we want to know if they're potentially going to slip. And we're
interested in that because the ones that are potentially active today are going to be the ones
that are most important for fluid flow, okay?
 So, this idea of relating the stress field to the faults, so that now we've related the stress field to
the pore pressure. And we're now relating the, the faults to the stress field, and so you can see
how all of these various things are, are interrelated as we build our model.

UNIT 8: STRESS CONCENTRATION AROUND VERTICAL WELLS

 So how do we get our information about stress?

 We use the stress concentration around the vertical well. We'll go through the mathematics for
this in great detail. But basically, the way to think about it, we're going to go through it all for a
vertical well where one principle stress is vertical.
 That is, sort of the normal case, where one principle stress is vertical. Vertical wells are
ubiquitous, but we're going to then generalize it for the general case of any orientation of any
well, and in fact, any orientation of any stress field which is an unusual case, but a case we'll talk
about in the next lecture.
 For a vertical well, where one principle stress is vertical, the hoop stress, the stress that acts sort
of in, you know, parallel to the circumference of the well. This hoop stress varies sinusoidally
around the well such that, in this case, if we have Shmax operating in sort of a north-south
direction, we see a very strong compressive hoop stress 90 degrees from the direction of Shmax,
 which can lead to wellbore failure, compressive failure of the rocks, and these are called
breakouts. The rock here fails and falls out during the drilling process.
 Under some conditions, this hoop stress can actually become negative, and the rock can actually
fail in tension. These are called drilling induced tensile fractures. And this can also occur during
normal drilling operations.
 Now, because the stress concentration is related to the orientation of stresses, if we know the
orientation of the breakouts, or we know the orientation of the drilling induced tensile fractures,
we know the orientation of the stress state.
 We also know that the stress concentration here was enough to exceed the strength of the rock.
So, just by recognizing that these failures of the rock have occurred, we're beginning to get a lot
of information about this stress field, just by looking at the well.

 And here's what looking at the well means.

 Now on the left is what's called a UBI log. It’s an ultrasonic scan of the well bore wall. So, this is a
few meters of depth, and we go around the wall from north, around the well, north, east, south,
west and north. And here we make a cross section of the well from these little acoustic pulses
that have been bounced off the wall.
 And we can in fact see the breakouts here, which correspond to these dark zones here where
the acoustic pulse is scattered. And immediately we know that, you know, the Shmax direction is
like that, okay?
 Now this is an electrical image log. It's Schlumberger, one of the service companies refer to
these logs as FMI logs. It’s basically an array of electrodes that is pushed against the well bore
wall. And what you can see is this out of focus zone here, and here, and that's because this array
of electrodes is not in good contact with the well bore wall here. But nonetheless, you can see
the the result of these breakouts occurring, and again it gives you an idea of Shmax.
 What's interesting about this well is here and here we actually see drilling induced tensile
fractures which are 90 degrees from the breakouts, right? So these two things are 180 degrees
apart and these two are 180 degrees apart and 90 degrees offset.
 So those drilling induced tensile fractures, which you can't see in the cross section here, are
giving us the independent indication of the direction. And again, it's telling us that the that the
hoop stress actually got down into a tensile failure mode and that the compressive stress got
into a mode where we're actually exceeding the strength of the rock.
 Just by looking at the well, we're learning a lot about the relationship between stress in the
earth and the rock properties.