Advances in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing have sparked a natural gas boom from shale formations in the United States. Regulators face a rapidly changing industry comprised of hundreds of players, operating tens of thousands of wells across 30 states. They are often challenged to respond by budget cuts, a brain drain to industry, regulations designed for conventional gas developm...

Hydraulic fracturing and matrix stimulation are two major methods of the reservoir stimulation. Hydraulic fracturing, which is the newest technique and technically more complex, is very useful in low permeability reservoirs. Although it has been used widely in hydrocarbon production wells, it is a new method in Iran. In this paper, the effect of sufficient barrier layers on hydraulic fracturing...

Many natural examples of complex joint and vein networks in layered sedimentary rocks are hydro-fractures that form by a combination of pore fluid overpressure and tectonic stresses. In this paper, a two-dimensional hybrid hydro-mechanical formulation is proposed to model the dynamic development of natural hydrofractures. The numerical scheme combines a Discrete Element Model (DEM) framework th...

During underground nuclear tests, rocks may fail by plastic yielding, which limits shear strength, or by tensile fracture, wherever maximum principal stress exceeds tensile strength. A third mode of failure exists due to friction along closed fractured surfaces. There, friction affects slipping and can thus limit stress. In this paper, we study the effect of friction on the simulated dynamic re...

Introduction: Impacts initiate dynamic fracturing on macro-and micro-scales, and the resulting fragmentation can be related to strain rate. The dynamic fracture process has been directly observed at low strain rates (~10-2 to 10-3 s-1 , during earthquakes) and at high strain rates (~10 5 to 10 6 s-1 , during laboratory-scale hypervelocity impact experiments) [1]. Based on first order estimates ...

With the introduction of hydraulic fracturing technology, the United States has become the largest natural gas producer in the world with a substantial portion of the production coming from shale plays. In this review, we examined current hydraulic fracturing literature including associated wastewater management on quantity and quality of groundwater. We conclude that proper documentation/repor...

Nearly 70 years old, hydraulic fracturing is a core technique for stimulating hydrocarbon production in a majority of oil and gas reservoirs. Complex fluids are implemented in nearly every step of the fracturing process, most significantly to generate and sustain fractures and transport and distribute proppant particles during and following fluid injection. An extremely wide range of complex fl...

Induced seismicity due to fluid injection, including hydraulic fracturing, is an increasingly common phenomenon worldwide; yet, the mechanisms by which fracturing causes fault activation remain unclear. Here we show that preexisting fracture networks are instrumental in transferring pressures larger faults on dynamic rupture occurs. Studies of fracturing-induced North America have often used ob...

Hydraulic fracturing has been used widely to stimulate production of oil, natural gas, and geothermal energy in formations with low natural permeability. Numerical optimization of fracture stimulation often requires a large number of evaluations of objective functions and constraints from forward hydraulic fracturing models, which are computationally expensive and even prohibitive in some situa...