Laboratory Experiments of Hydraulic Fracturing in Unconsolidated Sands

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...

Microbiology relevant to hydraulic fracturing and oil sands

The conference paper on this site describes metagenomic DNA sequencing of flowback water from hydraulic fracturing sites with the goal of determining the microbes present and their potential role in biodegradation. This patent describes a mannohydrolase from a ther-mophilic bacterium that will maintain activity of temperatures as high as 150 degrees centigrade. The FracFocus website contains in...

Laboratory Investigation on the Influence of Cyclic Water Injection Pressure on Sands Hydraulic Conductivity

Hydraulic conductivity variations around the boreholes in uniformly graded sands for cyclic water injection pressure have been evaluated by laboratory tests. Prototype laboratory devices have been designed and constructed for this research. The cell has a capability to model the well, the boundary condition and to measure the hydraulic conductivity. While increasing water injection pressure, hy...

Hydraulic and Pneumatic Fracturing

Energy Analysis of Hydraulic Fracturing

In this paper, numerical simulations of circular boreholes under internal hydraulic pressure are carried out to investigate the energy transferred to the surrounding rock and the breakdown pressure. The simulations are conducted by using a micromechanical continuum damage model proposed by Golshani et al. (2006). The simulation results suggest that the borehole breakdown pressure and the energy...