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Contributions of Compaction and Aquathermal Pressuring to Geopressure and the Influence of Environmental Conditions (1)

1992; American Association of Petroleum Geologists; Volume: 76; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1306/bdff8a42-1718-11d7-8645000102c1865d

1558-9153

XIAORONG LUO and GUY VASSEUR,

Drilling and Well Engineering

In their discussion of our paper (Luo and Vasseur, 1992), Miller and Luk (1993) present interesting arguments leading to the conclusion that, in some circumstances, the aquathermal pressuring effect may be appreciable in the development of overpressure sin sedimentary basins. This contradicts our conclusion that, in actual geological environments, the aquathermal factor has no practical significance. Miller and Luk (1993) argue that we did not take into account possible unloading effects. Indeed, we implicitly assumed that the sediment is submitted to effective stresses with a monotonous increase. In such circumstances, we showed that the sediment compressibility is large enough to prevent the aquathermal effect from being important. But Miller and Luk stated that a much smaller value of sediment compressibility should be used when the effective stress becomes less than it has been previously. This would drastically increase the relative importance of the aquathermal pressuring effect. The key point, therefore, is in what circumstances such an effective stress decrease may occur. These circumstances are discussed.