It is always dangerous to assume that just because you don’t use a technology that “nobody” uses that technology. Stress and strain are the fundamental processes that drive the deformation of rocks (i.e. structural geology). It touches so many aspects of the study that I would argue that an absence of grounding in the basic concepts would be a serious shortcoming.

I am a structural geologist in the oil and gas industry, and we deal with critical stress-strain problems on a daily basis. From my professional experience I would add the following key reasons to want to know how stress tensors work:

Wellbore stability during and after drilling

Avoiding drilling induced fractures and/or seismicity

Fracking of tight rocks to enhance permeability to fluids

Pore pressure prediction

Subsurface fluid migration in the overpressured conditions of most deep basins

Hydrocarbon column height prediction

Basic “pore pressure-stress-strain” relationships associated with the formation of faults and folds

Subseismic fault and fracture prediction

Salt tectonics

Mobile shale tectonics

And these are just off the top of my head. I could come up with many more routine structural geology tasks which critically depend on a firm grasp of stress-strain relationships if I spent a little time reviewing past projects. It is not a stretch to argue that the modern energy-intensive lifestyle we have established would not be possible without structural geologists and geological engineers with a firm grounding in stress-strain relationships. It touches every prospect we ever propose, every well we ever drill, and every reservoir we ever produce.

Obviously, I am a strong advocate of stress-strain relationships being part of the core curriculum in structural geology training. It is impossible to come to a process-driven understanding of deformed rocks without it. And, when paired with the more mining-related subdisciplines listed previously, I think a reasonable argument could be made that we could not explore the subsurface without it.

Scot Krueger

Reasons I DO want to know the stress tensor of a rock:

Getting hot dry rock geothermal hydraulic fracturing to work.

Mine wall stability.

Hydrocarbon reservoir engineering.

CO2 storage.

Fault seal limitations.

Stoping.

Economics of ore shoot extraction.

Earthquake hazard assessment using dynamic or mechanical models.

Is this real world enough?