Width Evolution of the Hydraulic Fractures in Different Reservoir Rocks

Excerpt

Hydraulic fracturing has become an important technology in the development and exploitation of unconventional gas (including tight sand gas and shale gas) and geothermal resources. The fracture networks constitute of hydraulic fractures, and natural fractures provide the pathways for fracturing fluid and gas molecular. In recent decades, many researches of numerical simulation and experiments into this issue had been performed. To reveal the fracture patterns, Pradhan et al. (2015) investigated stress-induced fracturing in sandstone and limestone cores by acoustic monitoring and microcomputed tomography image analysis. Renard et al. (2009) studied the 3D imaging of hydraulic fracture propagation in limestone cores using synchrotron X-ray microtomography. The results showed that hydraulic fractures propagated by the linkage of the pores. Lin et al. (2017) investigated the anisotropic characteristics of Longmaxi Shale in hydraulic fracturing experiments. The research by He et al. (2016) demonstrated the effects of anisotropy and heterogeneity on the pathways of hydraulic fractures in reservoir rocks. …