Abstract
Hydraulic fracturing has been widely used in recent years as a key technology to improve energy mining efficiency in petroleum and geothermal industries. Laboratory hydraulic fracturing experiments recently were completed in six large-scale 300 × 300 × 300 mm rock specimens to better understand this complex process of hydraulic fracturing. When injection flow rate increases from 5 to 30 mL/min. The fracture initiation pressures and breakdown pressures increase, the propagation times and post-fracturing pressures decrease. The fracture geometries are observed and analyzed, mean injection power is proposed and results show that it could be used to roughly estimate the fracture total lengths. Moreover, the fracture permeabilities based on the pressure data are calculated and linearly ascend with the increase of injection flow rates. These results can provide some reasonable advice for implementing hydraulic fracturing reservoir simulations and improving energy production efficiency on application to field-scale operation.
Highlights
Hydraulic fracturing has been widely used in recent years as a key technology to improve energy mining efficiency in petroleum and geothermal industries [1,2,3,4]
The laboratorial hydraulic fracturing experiment usually involves drilling a borehole in a rock sample, an injection tube is sealed in the hole, and fluid is injected to induce fractures
This study aims to investigate the influence of the fracturing fluid flow rate on the fracture pressure system consists of a steel framework with minimum yield of 60 MPa, three square flat jacks initiation, propagation geometry and permeability
Summary
Hydraulic fracturing has been widely used in recent years as a key technology to improve energy mining efficiency in petroleum and geothermal industries [1,2,3,4]. The hydraulic fracturing process involves drilling a hole deep into a layer of rock [9]. The fluid is pumped under high pressure into rocks to fracture and enhance the reservoir connectivity [10]. The injection flow rate and injection pressure are the critical operating parameter for the effective design of hydraulic fracturing process [13,14,15]. The laboratorial hydraulic fracturing experiment usually involves drilling a borehole in a rock sample, an injection tube is sealed in the hole, and fluid is injected to induce fractures. We use the outcrop rock samples as substitutes (Figure 2a). Three independent triaxial principal stresses are applied on cube-shaped samples to simulate the real field in-situ stress conditions, the rocks are cut into 300 × 300 × 300 mm cubes.
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