Reservoir cooling during waterflooding or waste-water injection results in thermo-poro-elastic stresses that can significantly
alter the reservoir stress tensor field. In addition, colloidal particles in the injected water can filter on the
borehole and fracture surfaces resulting in matrix permeability reduction. Fractures are likely to initiate and propagate
from injectors because of these thermal and filtration effects. These fractures are of great concern for both environmental
reasons and their strong influence on reservoir sweep and oil recovery. In this paper, a fully coupled reservoir-fracturewellbore
model was developed. Fluid flow, solid mechanics, energy balance, fracture initiation and propagation, and
particle filtration are modeled in the reservoir, fracture, and wellbore domains. The coupled non-linear systems of equations
are solved implicitly using the Newton–Raphson method.
Simulation results show that water quality and thermal effects control fluid leak-off and fracture growth. While it
is difficult to predict the exact location of fracture initiation due to reservoir heterogeneity, we propose a reasonable
method to handle fracture initiation and growth without a predefined fracture location. In open-hole completions,
“thief” fractures may propagate deep into the reservoir. Thermal stress changes in the injection zone are shown to be
significant because of the combined effects of forced convection, heat conduction, and poro-elasticity. Accurate predictions
of thermal stress in different reservoir layers allow us to conduct numerical studies on fracture height growth
and containment. We show that controlling the injection water temperature and the water quality are an effective way
to ensure fracture containment.