Water Quality and Quantity Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing

Potential impacts of hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas on drinking water resources.

Background The goal of this work was to investigate the potential for subsurface migration of fluids from the stimulated oil and gas reservoir to an overlying drinking water aquifer. Researchers conducted two types of numerical simulation experiments: (1) exploration of hypothetical scenarios that could result in emergence of fluid pathways; and (2) evaluation of the range of conditions that ma...

Hydraulic and Pneumatic Fracturing

Complex Fluids and Hydraulic Fracturing.

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...

Hydraulic fracturing and its peculiarities

Methods: A cohesive fracture model is adopted together with a discrete crack and without predetermined fracture path. The fracture is filled with interface elements which in the 2D case are quadrangular and triangular elements and in the 3D case are either tetrahedral or wedge elements. The Rankine criterion is used for fracture nucleation and advancement. In a 2D setting the fracture follows d...

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...