Publications related to Environmental impact of fracking

Propagation of planar three-dimensional buoyant hydraulic fractures

Hydraulic fractures are driven by an internal fluid pressure exceeding the minimum compressive stress, propagating in a direction perpendicular to the latter. This class of tensile fractures has gained interest over the last fifty years due to the developm ...

EPFL2023

Elongated hydraulic fracture emerging from layers of alternating fracture toughness

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Carlo Peruzzo

Whether used to enhance the hydrocarbon production from low permeability rocks or to measure the minimum in-situ principal stress in rock formations, height growth of a hydraulic fracture above the formation of interest is a key metric for the design of su ...

2023

Arrest Mechanisms of Buoyant Hydraulic Fractures

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Andreas Möri, Carlo Peruzzo, Dmitriy Garagash

Hydraulic fracturing (HF) treatments can form widespread fractures. Understanding their containment at depth is critical, given the positive buoyancy contrast between the fracturing fluid and the surrounding rock, promoting upward growth. We study arrest m ...

American Rock Mechanics Association (ARMA), OnePetro2023

Shearing and opening of a pre-existing discontinuity in response to fluid injection

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Alexis Alejandro Sáez Uribe, Ankit Gupta

We investigate the fluid-driven growth of a shear crack along a frictional discontinuity and its transition to hydraulic fracturing (sometimes referred to as hydraulic jacking) under plane-strain conditions. We focus on the case of a constant friction coef ...

2023

Automatic and high-precision microseismic monitoring of progressive failure prior, during, and after tunnel excavation

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Seyyedmaalek Momeni, Christophe Nussbaum

Acoustic emission (AE) monitoring is commonly used to inspect the health of a structure continuously. During fracture processes elastic waves of AE are created and emitted, and sensors can capture these waves. The acquired signals can be processed to track ...

2023

Modeling of solids particle diversion to promote uniform growth of multiple hydraulic fractures

Guanyi Lu

Solid particulate additives are sometimes used to promote the uniform growth of multiple hydraulic fractures in horizontal oil and gas wells. The principle is that solid particulates block, accumulate, and form larger porous plugging zones preferentially a ...

ELSEVIER2023

Three-dimensional hydraulic fracture propagation in homogeneous and heterogeneous media

Carlo Peruzzo

Hydraulic fractures are tensile fractures that occur in solid materials due to the natural intrusion or anthropogenic injection of a viscous fluid into a fracture channel. The deliberate creation of hydraulic fractures is part of an industrial technology h ...

EPFL2023

Reactivation of variably sealed joints and permeability enhancement in geothermal reservoir rocks

Alexandra Roma Larisa Kushnir, Michael Heap

Hydraulic stimulation of enhanced deep geothermal reservoirs commonly targets pre-existing joint networks with the goal of increasing reservoir permeability. Here, we study the permeability and strength of joint-free and jointed Buntsandstein sandstones fr ...

2023

INFLUENCE OF VOIDS ON THICK DCB JOINT BEHAVIOR

Véronique Michaud, Anastasios Vassilopoulos, Jialiang Fan

The influence of voids on the quasi-static Mode I fracture performance of thick adhesive joints was investigated in this article. Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) joints were manufactured with glass fiber reinforced epoxy adherends and SikaPower®-830 epoxy adh ...

2023

Experimental Investigation of Hydraulic Fracture Closure in a Porous Sandstone

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Seyyedmaalek Momeni, Mohsen Talebkeikhah, Guanyi Lu

Depending on the type of fracture propagation regime when the injection stops, the closure of the fracture may occur exactly after the injection ceases, in the case where the fracturing process is dominated by fracture energy, or the fracture propagate for ...

Onepetro2022

Effects of velocity-dependent apparent toughness on the pre- and post-shut-in growth of a hydraulic fracture

Dong Liu, Guanyi Lu

We investigate the growth of a plane-strain/radial hydraulic fracture in an infinite impermeable medium driven by a constant injection rate assuming that the apparent toughness scales with the decreasing fracture growth rate in a power-law relation. The vi ...

ELSEVIER SCI LTD2022

Weakening effect of various pore fluids on the tensile strength of granite

Guanyi Lu

Laboratory three-point bending experiments are carried out to evaluate the effect of various fluids on the tensile strength of granite. The granite specimens were tested under both dry and saturated conditions. The fluids used to saturate the granite inclu ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2022

Experimental investigation of hydraulic fracture growth in an anisotropic rock with pre-existing discontinuities under different propagation regimes

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Seyyedmaalek Momeni, Guanyi Lu

Laboratory experiments have been carried out to investigate the growth of hydraulic fracture (HF) in an anisotropic rock with pre-existing discontinuities such as bedding planes and veins. The experiments are designed in light of scaling relationships that ...

2022

Arrest of a radial hydraulic fracture upon shut-in of the injection

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Andreas Möri

We investigate the propagation and arrest of a radial hydraulic fracture upon the end of the injection. Depending on the regime of propagation at the time of shut-in of the injection, excess elastic energy may be stored in the surrounding medium. Once the ...

2021

Combining active and passive acoustic methods to image hydraulic fracture growth in laboratory experiments

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Seyyedmaalek Momeni, Dong Liu

We combine active and passive acoustic measurements to improve the spatio- temporal imaging of hydraulic fracture growth performed under true triaxial confinement in the laboratory. 64 active piezo-electric transducers (54 P waves, 10 S waves) work in sour ...

IOP2021

Hydraulic fracture growth in quasi-brittle materials

Dong Liu

Hydraulic fracturing is a technique often used in the oil and gas industry to enhance the production of wells in low-permeability reservoirs. It consists of fluid injection at a sufficiently large injection rate to create and propagate tensile fractures in ...

EPFL2021

Stress management in the context of induced seismicity in subsurface reservoirs

Barnaby Padraig Fryer

The stress state of the subsurface has been shown to have an influence on a number of key processes. For example, the criticality of the stress state indicates how large stress changes need to be before a fault begins to slip, the mean effective stress con ...

EPFL2020

Effect of Fluid Viscosity on Earthquake Nucleation

Marie Estelle Solange Violay, Chiara Cornelio

Injection of fluids in geo-reservoirs can reduce the effective stresses at depth, lubricating the nearby faults, promoting slip and, potentially, earthquakes. High-viscous fluids are often used during hydraulic fracturing and production phases in geo-reser ...

2020

Experimental studies of hydro-mechanical couplings in Enhanced Geothermal Reservoirs

Mateo Alejandro Acosta

Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) allow for worldwide geothermal electricity production. They target deep (3-5 km), fractured rock reservoirs whose permeability is artificially increased through hydraulic stimulations (fluid injections). The injections mod ...

EPFL2020

Mechanical and hydraulic transport properties of transverse-isotropic Gneiss deformed under deep reservoir stress and pressure conditions

Marie Estelle Solange Violay, Mateo Alejandro Acosta

In central Europe, many geo-energy reservoirs have revealed to be hosted in transverse isotropic crystalline rock, where the rock's mechanical and hydraulic transport properties are poorly constrained. Here, we performed triaxial experiments on Cresciano G ...

2020