Abstract of the paper ``Effective-stress rules for pore-fluid transport in rocks containing two minerals''

When an oil field is being pumped down, the in situ hydrostatic pressure decreases and permeability also decreases in response. Possibility of controlling this process depends on knowing the correct effective-stress rule for permeability in the field. Although some effective-stress analysis for permeability has been published previously, the work summarized here is the first to use scaling rules to establish general results. Data on the pore-pressure dependence of fluid permeability for some rocks cannot be explained using any equivalent homogeneous porous medium. However, deformation measurements on both high porosity sandstones and low porosity granites have been explained adequately in terms of an equivalent two-constituent model of porous rocks, for which exact results relating constituent moduli to macroscopic effective moduli have been discovered.

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