The safe disposal of liquid wastes associated with oil and gas production in the United States is a major challenge given their large volumes and typically high levels of contaminants. In Pennsylvania, oil and gas wastewater is sometimes treated at brine treatment facilities and discharged to local streams. This study examined the water quality and isotopic compositions of discharged effluents,...

Implementation of hydraulic fracturing dramatically altered the fundamentals in the oil and gas markets. A new technology rst got implemented in the natural gas market, but by 2012 unprecedentedly low gas prices forced most exploration rms to switch to shale oil exploration. Large capital expenditure on drilling activity resulted in the growth of oil production in the US, and likely triggered t...

The geochemical characteristics of shallow groundwater are essential for environmental impact studies in the shale gas production area. Jiaoshiba in the Sichuan basin is the first commercial-scale shale gas production area in China. This paper studied the geochemical and isotopic characteristics of the shallow groundwater of the area for future environmental concerns. Results show that the aver...

It is clearly proposed that “lithofacies paleogeography can be used as a guide for shale gas geological survey work”. Lithofacies not only the theoretical guidance of work, but also its related mapping technology method key to “find” gas.

Shale formations show obvious anisotropic characteristics in their mechanical properties due to pronounced bedding planes and natural fractures. This anisotropic behavior generally creates complex fracturing networks and is crucial to gas shale stimulation. Although much research has been done to study the anisotropic compression behaviors of shale with static and quasi-static strain rates, the...

Various models featuring horizontal wells with multiple fractures have been proposed to characterize flow behavior over time in tight and shale gas systems. Currently, only very little is known about the effects of nonideal fracture patterns and coupled primary-secondary fracture interactions on reservoir performance in unconventional gas reservoirs. We developed a 3D Voronoi mesh-maker that pr...

Development of unconventional shale gas reservoirs (SGRs) has been boosted by the advancements in two key technologies: horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing. A large number of multi-stage fractured horizontal wells (MsFHW) have been drilled to enhance reservoir production performance. Gas flow in SGRs is a multi-mechanism process, including: desorption, diffusion, and non-Da...

SUMMARY The hydro-mechanical behaviour of shales is becoming one of the most important issues in modern geomechanics, largely driven by petroleum industries (i.e., the extraction of shale gas), the sequestration of CO2 and the nuclear waste geological storage. In any such application, a deep understanding of the hydro-mechanical behaviour of the involved materials is of primary significance. Th...

Railway transportation is playing a key role in the development of many new shale oil and gas reserves in North America. In the rush to develop new shale oil and gas plays, sites for railway transload terminals are often selected on the basis of land availability and environmental constraints before full consideration is given to rail design and operating requirements. The result can be termina...