Guidelines to define the critical injection flow rate to avoid formation damage during slurry injection into high permeability sandstone

Case studies have been presented in this paper which evaluates such slurry injection wells. Based on the data analyzed in this study, inducing the fracture with solids-laden slurry rather than with clean fluid by causes the injection pressure to continuously increase, ultimately leading to significantly reduced formation capacity. Recommendations are presented as well for how to avoid this condition even if the pumps do not have the capacity to provide the required injection flow rate using clean fluid. One such solution is to add a viscosifier to the clean pad fluid to raise the fluid viscosity which enables the creation of a hydraulic fracture at lower flow rate.