Abstract
Hydraulic fracturing has been a widely applied method of measuring stresses in a borehole drilled from the surface. It is generally assumed that such boreholes are parallel to a principal stress with a magnitude equivalent to the weight of overburden. In this paper, we describe the hydraulic fracturing method for calculating the 3-D earth stresses using several inclined boreholes which are oriented in different directions. We discuss how fractures initiate and then how the data are interpreted when the borehole is not in a direction of a principal stress. Then we describe results of hydraulic fracturing stress measurements at an underground power plant and compare them with results of overcoring tests to verify this method. The overall agreement between hydraulic fracturing and overcoring methods would indicate that our procedure for hydraulic fracturing stress measurements is applicable to practical problems in the field.
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