Comparing mechanical and ultrasonic behaviour of a brittle and a ductile shale: Relevance to prediction of borehole stability and verification of shale barriers

Borehole collapse during drilling operations in shale formations is a well-known and costly problem within the petroleum industry. Recently it has become evident that shales may also form sealing barriers around the casing, reducing the need for cement jobs on new wells, and reducing costs for plugging and abandonment of old wells. The forming of such barriers involves large deformations of shale through creep and plastic processes. Hence, it is important to be able to characterize to what extent shales may fail in a brittle or ductile manner, in both cases causing possible hole instabilities during drilling, and in the case of ductile shales, enabling permanent sealing barriers. Triaxial failure tests, creep tests and tests tailored to follow the failure envelope under simulated borehole conditions have been performed with two soft shales. One shale fails in a more brittle manner than the other and fails to form a sealing barrier in the laboratory. The more ductile shale has been proved to form barriers both in the laboratory and in the field. By comparing their behavior, it is seen that the ductile shale exhibits normally consolidated behaviour, while the more brittle shale is overconsolidated. This points to the stress history and possibly cementation as keys in determining the failure mode. In addition, porosity, clay content, ultrasonic velocities, unconfined strength and friction angle may be used as indicators of brittle or ductile post-failure behaviour. Ultrasonic velocity and in particular attenuation measurements are shown to be sensitive to the failure initiation process, although stress sensitivity is much lower in the ductile than in the brittle case. The experiments provide values for anisotropic velocities as well as P-wave impedances that are necessary for open as well as cased hole log interpretation, in particular for barrier verification and possibly for monitoring of barrier formatio