Hydraulic fracturing in shale gas reservoirs has usually resulted in complex fracture network. The results of micro-seismic monitoring showed that the nature and degree of fracture complexity must be clearly understood to optimize stimulation design and completion strategy. This is often called stimulated reservoir volume (SRV). In the oil & gas industry, stimulated reservoir volume has made th...

A combination of subsurface borehole imaging data and drilling logs were used to characterize the fractures and lithology in 40 bedrock wells at the fractured-rock research site in the Mirror Lake area in Grafton County, New Hampshire. The purpose of the research was to determine whether subsurface lithology and fractures have an effect on the hydraulic conductivity of the crystalline-rock aqui...

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...

The water leak-off during hydraulic fracturing in shale gas reservoirs is a complicated transport behavior involving thermal (T), hydrodynamic (H), mechanical (M) and chemical (C) processes. Although many leak-off models have been published, none of the models fully coupled the transient fluid flow modeling with heat transfer, chemical-potential equilibrium and natural-fracture dilation phenome...

Hydraulic fracturing is an effective technique for increasing the productivity of wells producing from low permeability formations. Tracer fracture monitoring technique is near-wellbore zone frctures direct test method that can monitor the height and width of hydraulic fractures in the near-wellbore section. ZeroWash Tracer uses a medium strength ceramic proppant which is mainly used in fractur...

Hydraulic support is the main supporting equipment of the coal mining systems, and they are usually subjected to fatigue failure under the high dynamic load. The fracture positions are generally at welded joints where there is a serious stress concentration. In order to investigate and further improve the fatigue strength of hydraulic support, the present work first located the possible positio...

Gas storage fields have numerous wells that are used for both injection during low demand periods and withdrawal during high demand periods. As these wells age, their deliverability declines due to several factors. Stimulation treatments (hydraulic fracturing of the formation) are routinely used in gas industry to improve gas well productivity. This study was conducted on a large natural gas st...

One of the important hurdles in horizontal well stimulation is the generation of hydraulic fractures (HFs) from all perforation clusters within a given stage despite the challenges posed by stress shadowing and reservoir variability. In this paper we use a newly-developed, fully coupled, parallel-planar 3D HF model to investigate the potential to minimize the negative impact of stress shadowing...

To capture the hydraulic fractures in heterogeneous and layered rocks, a numerical code that can consider the coupled effects of fluid flow, damage, and stress field in rocks is presented. Based on the characteristics of a typical thin and inter-bedded sedimentary reservoir, China, a series of simulations on the hydraulic fracturing are performed. In the simulations, three points, i.e., (1) con...