Gas fracturing behavior and breakdown pressure prediction model for granite under different confining pressure and injection rate

Abstract

Conventional hydraulic fracturing techniques are often found problematic for extracting geothermal energy in hot dry rock (HDR). As an alternative, employing the less viscous gas to replace water as the fracturing fluid showed great potential for more effective fracturing of HDR. In this work, the failure behavior and mechanism of granite during gas fracturing under different confining pressures and gas injection rates are comprehensively examined. It is shown that the breakdown pressure increases with the increase of confining pressure, whereas higher gas injection rate can result in evident decrease of the breakdown pressure. As the confining pressure grows, the acoustic emission (AE) event increases rapidly, with much higher AE counts observed at high gas injection rates than at low injection rates. Comparatively, the AE energy decreases under high confining pressure, due probably to granite transitioning from brittle to ductile. It is interesting that the b-value of AE varies dramatically as the gas injection rate becomes higher with significant fluctuations, indicating the ratio of large fracture and small fracture changes drastically during gas fracturing. In addition, the length of the induced fractures decreases with the increase of confining pressure during gas fracturing, and the length and width of vertical fractures are evidently larger when at high gas injection rate. Last, a novel theoretical predictive model is proposed for estimating breakdown pressure during gas fracturing based on the average tensile stress criteria, which is featured by considering the effect of confining pressure and gas flow behaviors. The theoretical prediction agrees with the experimental results. The present study can provide valuable results for theoretical analysis and engineering applications of gas fracturing in stimulating the HDR reservoirs.