Natural fractures seem to be ubiquitous in shale gas plays. It is often said that their presence is one of the most critical factors in defining an economic or prospective shale gas play. Many investigators have presumed that open natural fractures are critical to gas production from deeper plays such as the Barnett, as they are for shallower gas shales such as the Dev‐ onian shales of the nort...

The image logs interpretation from two wells in a fold hosting a west Iranian oil field located in the Dezful Embayment, SW Iran reveal the occurrence of two major systems of natural fractures. In the central part of the fold, the fold-related fractures include two sets of fractures trending N53°E and N34°E. In the eastern and also curved part of the fold, the strike of open fractures varies fr...

The shearing of natural fractures is important in the permeability enhancement of shale gas reservoirs during hydraulic fracturing treatment. In this work, the shearing mechanisms of natural fractures are analyzed using a newly proposed numerical model based on the displacement discontinuities method. The fluid-rock coupling system of the model is carefully designed to calculate the shearing of...

Chang 8 oil deposit, developed in Hohe and Jihe oil fields at the southern Yi-Shan Slop of Ordos Basin, is regarded as a kind of typical sand reservoir formation with super-low porosity, poor permeability, strong anisotropy as well as locally natural faults and fractures. The previous studies believed that matrix reservoir has a good permeability, whereas fracture reservoir has a reverse manner...