Hydraulic fracturing fluid migration in the subsurface: A review and expanded modeling results

Constraints on Upward Migration of Hydraulic Fracturing Fluid and Brine

Recent increases in the use of hydraulic fracturing (HF) to aid extraction of oil and gas from black shales have raised concerns regarding potential environmental effects associated with predictions of upward migration of HF fluid and brine. Some recent studies have suggested that such upward migration can be large and that timescales for migration can be as short as a few years. In this articl...

Hydraulic fracturing not responsible for methane migration.

Although Osborn et al. (1) provided important geochemical measurements of dissolved methane in a portion of the Appalachian basin, their report does not fully appreciate the geologic history of this region and misrepresents potential risks of modern drilling and completion techniques used to develop shale-gas resources. The fear that hydraulic fracturing is responsible for methane migration fro...

On the crack propagation modeling of hydraulic fracturing by a hybridized displacement discontinuity/boundary collocation method

Numerical methods such as boundary element and finite element methods are widely used for the stress analysis in solid mechanics. This study presents boundary element method based on the displacement discontinuity formulation to solve general problems of interaction between hydraulic fracturing and discontinuities. The crack tip element and a higher order boundary displacement collocation techn...

Hydraulic and Pneumatic Fracturing

Numerical Modeling of Hydraulic Fracturing in Oil Sands

Hydraulic fracturing is a widely used and e cient technique for enhancing oil extraction from heavy oil sands deposits. Application of this technique has been extended from cemented rocks to uncemented materials, such as oil sands. Models, which have originally been developed for analyzing hydraulic fracturing in rocks, are in general not satisfactory for oil sands. This is due to a high leak-o...