Geofluids

Diagenetic facies play a significant role in the evaluation and prediction of reservoirs as they comprehensively reflect the spatial distribution characteristics of deposition, diagenesis, and petrophysical properties. Based on the petrographic observation and considering pores, lithology, and diagenesis types, the diagenetic facies types were identified, and the pore evolution process and its influence on the quality of low permeability tight gas reservoirs were analyzed. The results show that six types of diagenetic facies were identified, including siliceous cementation intergranular pore facies (A), carbonate dissolution pore facies (B), matrix dissolution pore facies (C), clastic dissolution pore facies (D), matrix filling and strong compaction tight facies (E), and carbonate cementation and metasomatism tight facies (F). The evolution process of porosity shows that the restored original porosity is indicated to be between 34.2% and 36.0%. The average porosity loss caused by compaction was 17.1%, while the average porosity loss caused by cementation is 14.1%. The average porosity increased by 2.5% on diagenetic facies B, C, and D due to dissolution. Consequently, diagenetic facies A with weak compaction and diagenetic facies B, C, and D with strong dissolution are effective reservoirs with porosity greater than 6.6% and permeability greater than  μm². The distribution areas of A, B, C, and D are favorable areas for tight gas exploration and are important indicators for the prediction of tight gas in the Upper Paleozoic Shanxi Formation in the eastern Ordos Basin. This study provides a new petrographic method for reservoir prediction and exploration of natural gas, which has practical value and economic significance.

The water-rich red sandstone strata at the Lanzhou Metro site area have special engineering properties and vary greatly in their speed of disintegration when exposed to water. There is an urgent need for a comprehensive and systematic study of the engineering properties of red sandstone and their classification. From the disintegration speed of red sandstone encountered during the excavation of Lanzhou metro lines 1 and 2, the relationship between physical parameters such as particle size, composition, dry density, and permeability coefficient as well as mechanical parameters such as shear wave speed, dynamic penetration test (DPT), natural uniaxial compressive strength, and disintegration speed of red sandstone was analyzed through indoor and outdoor tests and geological exploration data statistics, and classification guidelines for red sandstone are given. The results show a significant correlation between dry density, permeability coefficient, natural uniaxial compressive strength, and disintegration speed. The red sandstone can be classified as I, II, and III according to the disintegration speed, dry density, permeability coefficient, and natural uniaxial compressive strength. The design of the foundations is differentiated according to the classification, and different support systems are used for the deep foundation pits of the metro stations. The category I red sandstone pit is supported by diaphragm walls with internal bracing, the category II pit by bite piles with internal bracing, and the category III pit by row piles with internal bracing. The study results can provide technical support and experience reference for the investigation, design, and construction of metro projects in similar red sandstone distribution areas.

With the thermo-hydro-mechanical coupling process considered, this paper derives a set of analytical porothermoelastic solutions to field variables including the stress, displacement, and pore pressure fields to evaluate the wellbore stability around a vertical borehole drilled through an isotropic porous rock. The thermal effect on the wellbore stability of the low-permeability saturated rock also introduces the thermal osmosis term. The wellbore problem is decomposed into axisymmetric and deviatoric loading cases considering the borehole subjected to a nonhydrostatic stress field. It obtains the time-dependent distributions of field variables by performing the inversion technique for Laplace transforms to the porothermoelastic solutions in the Laplace domain. The results suggest that the thermal osmosis effect should not be neglected on the premise that a lower permeability porous rock is characterized by the substantially large thermal osmotic coefficient and the small thermal diffusivity values. The case that the thermal osmosis effect reduces the undrained loading effect leads to the decrease of the mean shear stress that is determined by the effective maximum and minimum stress around a borehole, since, and accordingly contributes to the wellbore stability to resist the shear failure.

Geared toward the problems of predicting the unsteadily changing single oil well production in water flooding reservoir, a machine learning model based on CNN (convolutional neural network) and LSTM (long short-term memory) is established which realizes precise predictions of monthly single-well production. This study is considering more than 60 dynamic and static factors that affect the changes of oil well production, introduce water injection parameters into data set, select 11 main control factors, and then, build a CNN-LSTM model optimized by Bayesian optimization. The effectiveness of the proposed model is verified in a realistic reservoir. The experiment results show that the prediction accuracy of the proposed model is over 90%, which suggests a penitential application in an extensive range of applications. Production forecasting by the developed model is simple, efficient, and accurate, which can provide a guidance for the dynamic analysis of a water flooding reservoir, and work as a good reference of the development and production of other types of reservoirs.

The resistivity method has been widely used to predict the water-bearing structure of tunnels. The traditional resistivity uses the point electrode (PE) source in the tunnel to excite the electric field. Because the tunnel face is inaccessible, its exploration depth is limited and small. In order to overcome this problem, the horizontal pilot hole is used as the long electrode (LE) source in the tunnel. We use the finite element method (FEM) to establish a three-dimensional modeling algorithm for tunnel detection using a long electrode source. The accuracy of the algorithm is verified by using the long electrode source model. By a lot of numerical simulations, a prediction model of a long electrode source for tunnel detection is firstly proposed. The predicted results show that it has good applicability in detecting long-distance anomaly. The comparison of the long electrode source and point electrode source models shows that the detection depth of the long electrode prediction model is farther than that of the point electrode source. This long electrode source method can improve the construction efficiency and effectively prevent water inrush in the tunnel.

This study investigated the supporting mechanism of the retaining piles and prestressed anchor cables of a deep foundation pit in alpine regions during the spring thaw. A numerical model was developed based on a subway project in Changchun City. Field monitoring data and the numerical model were used to analyze the variations in the ground settlement, horizontal displacement of the pile tops, and axial force of the anchor cables during the spring thaw under different working conditions. The results demonstrated that changes in the ground settlement primarily occurred in the late stages of the spring thaw with no obvious settlement phenomena because of the thaw. The pile top displacement of most piles remained stable. The axial force of the anchor cables gradually decreased and then sharply increased early in the spring thaw and then slowly decreased in the middle and late stages. Increasing the pile length decreased the pile top displacement to a certain point. Moreover, increasing the pile length increased the axial force of the first anchor cable but decreased the axial force of the lower four anchor cables. Furthermore, increasing the pile spacing increased the pile top displacement and axial force of the five anchor cables. Increasing the incident angle of the anchor cables decreased the pile top displacement and increased the axial force of the first, third, and fourth cables. The axial force of the second cable was minimized at an incident angle of 14°, and the axial force of the fifth cable was minimized at incident angles of 16° and 18°.