Review Of Hydraulic Fracturing Technology And Practices

The primary focus of today's hearing is our study on hydraulic fracturing, and hydraulic fracturing, so far as I understand it, or fracking, is the process by which water, sand, and a small amount of additives are pumped into a well to create enough pressure to fracture formations deep within the earth. That is pretty simple, but that is what they wrote out for me to say here. Advances in this 60-year-old technology, combined with horizontal drilling, have transformed the production of natural gas along with the natural gas industry. Access to shale gas that was until recently uneconomical and technically unrecoverable is driving state and local economic growth all around the country with providing new sources of domestic energy to meet growing demand. As with all energy development, deep gas drilling is not without risk and concerns about potential environmental effects. This has to be examined.

Review of hydraulic fracturing technology and practices: hearing before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, House of Representatives, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, first session, Wednesday, May 11, 2011.

Review of hydraulic fracturing technology and practices : hearing before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, House of Representatives, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, first session, Wednesday, May 11, 2011.

Review of hydraulic fracturing technology and practices: hearing before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, House of Representatives, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, first session, Wednesday, May 11, 2011.

The stimulation of unconventional hydrocarbon reservoirs is proven to improve their productivity to an extent that has rendered them economically viable. Generally, the stimulation design is a complex process dependent on intertwining factors such as the history of the formation, rock and reservoir fluid type, lithology and structural layout of the formation, cost, time, etc. A holistic grasp of these can be daunting, especially for people without sufficient experience and/or expertise in the exploitation of unconventional hydrocarbon reserves. This book presents the key facets integral to producing unconventional resources, and how the different components, if pieced together, can be used to create an integrated stimulation design. Areas covered are as follows: • stimulation methods, • fracturing fluids, • mixing and behavior of reservoir fluids, • assessment of reservoir performance, • integration of surface drilling data, • estimation of geomechanical properties and hydrocarbon saturation, and • health and safety. Exploitation of Unconventional Oil and Gas Resources: Hydraulic Fracturing and Other Recovery and Assessment Techniques is an excellent introduction to the subject area of unconventional oil and gas reservoirs, but it also complements existing information in the same discipline. It is an essential text for higher education students and professionals in academia, research, and the industry.

The expansion of unconventional petroleum resources in the recent decade and the rapid development of computational technology have provided the opportunity to develop and apply 3D numerical modeling technology to simulate the hydraulic fracturing of shale and tight sand formations. This book presents 3D numerical modeling technologies for hydraulic fracturing developed in recent years, and introduces solutions to various 3D geomechanical problems related to hydraulic fracturing. In the solution processes of the case studies included in the book, fully coupled multi-physics modeling has been adopted, along with innovative computational techniques, such as submodeling. In practice, hydraulic fracturing is an essential project component in shale gas/oil development and tight sand oil, and provides an essential measure in the process of drilling cuttings reinjection (CRI). It is also an essential measure for widened mud weight window (MWW) when drilling through naturally fractured formations; the process of hydraulic plugging is a typical application of hydraulic fracturing. 3D modeling and numerical analysis of hydraulic fracturing is essential for the successful development of tight oil/gas formations: it provides accurate solutions for optimized stage intervals in a multistage fracking job. It also provides optimized well-spacing for the design of zipper-frac wells. Numerical estimation of casing integrity under stimulation injection in the hydraulic fracturing process is one of major concerns in the successful development of unconventional resources. This topic is also investigated numerically in this book. Numerical solutions to several other typical geomechanics problems related to hydraulic fracturing, such as fluid migration caused by fault reactivation and seismic activities, are also presented. This book can be used as a reference textbook to petroleum, geotechnical and geothermal engineers, to senior undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate students, and to geologists, hydrogeologists, geophysicists and applied mathematicians working in this field. This book is also a synthetic compendium of both the fundamentals and some of the most advanced aspects of hydraulic fracturing technology.