Final Examination

The Graded Pass

This is the assessment the review bank prepared you for. Twenty-two questions, about two from each part, run one at a time. Pick an answer, submit it to see whether it was right and read why, then move on. At the end you get a score, a percentage, and a verdict. Seventy percent is a pass, ninety a distinction, and you can retake it as often as you like.

What Passing Means

Clearing this exam certifies two things, and the second matters more. First, that you can run the toolkit: resolve a stress onto a plane and read effective stress, place a rock against the Coulomb and Byerlee envelopes, predict pore pressure with Eaton, position a stress state in the frictional polygon, work the Kirsch stresses into a mud window, read a fracture gradient, and assemble a mechanical earth model from logs and tests. Second, and this is the real subject of the course, that you can read one field's stresses well enough to predict what it will do: which faults are dangerous, how much pressure a seal can take, when a well will collapse or sand, and where a fracture will go, and to state those predictions with the honest margins the data allow.

That judgment, the difference between a stable field and a critically stressed one, a contained fracture and a frac hit, a sealing caprock and a leaking one, is what makes a geomechanicist rather than a calculator. With the course reviewed and examined, one part remains: the Lab, where every model you have met assembles into a single workbench, a reference deck, a set of Python programs, and an advisor, and you drive the whole chain yourself.

References

• Zoback, M. D. (2007). Reservoir Geomechanics. Cambridge University Press.
• Fjaer, E., Holt, R. M., Horsrud, P., Raaen, A. M., & Risnes, R. (2008). Petroleum Related Rock Mechanics (2nd ed.). Elsevier.