Publications related to Unconventional (oil & gas) reservoir

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

A fully-coupled highly-parallelized geomechanical simulator for assessing induced seismicity

Jean-François Molinari, Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion, Guillaume Anciaux, Nicolas Richart, Emil Gallyamov

Induced seismicity caused by anthropogenic modification of the subsurface effective stress state has been observed in a number of industrial applications -- from hydrocarbon extraction (e.g., Groningen [1]), drilling waste-water disposal (e.g., [2]) to the ...

2023

Disentangling 1/f noise from confined ion dynamics

Théo Denis Tobias Emmerich

Ion transport through biological and solid-state nanochannels is known to be a highly noisy process. The power spectrum of current fluctuations is empirically known to scale like the inverse of frequency, following the long-standing yet poorly understood H ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2023

Expansion Work Recovery of Hydrogen for a FC-Truck-Tentative Design of an Expansion Machine

Alfred Rufer

Hydrogen powered vehicles use high-pressure reservoirs from which the gas is transferred to the low-pressure fuel-cell via a classical pressure reduction valve. In these systems no expansion work is recovered and the question is addressed of the potential ...

MDPI2023

Swelling and shrinkage of partially saturated gas shales: from laboratory tests to an effective stress framework

Jinwoo Kim

Gas shale swelling during hydraulic stimulation is one of the major challenges in unconventional gas development. It is hypothesized that the large volumetric strain upon water imbibition is a consequence of dramatic changes in capillary pressure and disjo ...

EPFL2022

Hierarchical tensile structures with ultralow mechanical dissipation

Tobias Kippenberg, Sergey Fedorov, Alberto Beccari, Amirali Arabmoheghi, Nils Johan Engelsen

Structural hierarchy is found in myriad biological systems and has improved man-made structures ranging from the Eiffel tower to optical cavities. In mechanical resonators whose rigidity is provided by static tension, structural hierarchy can reduce the di ...

Nature Portfolio2022

Covariance Estimation for Random Surfaces beyond Separability

Tomas Masák

This thesis focuses on non-parametric covariance estimation for random surfaces, i.e.~functional data on a two-dimensional domain. Non-parametric covariance estimation lies at the heart of functional data analysis, and considerations of statistical and com ...

EPFL2022

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

On the effects of fluid pressure variations on rock-mass and fault mechanical behaviour

Corentin Jean-Marie Rémi Noël

In the past 20 years, the growing interest in deep geo-reservoirs for purposes such as carbon storage, waste water disposal, or geothermal energy exploitation have led to large-volume fluid injections into the upper continental crust. These fluid injection ...

EPFL2021

Numerical investigation on water exchange of shale samples

Alessio Ferrari, Sara Incollingo

Interest in the hydraulic and mechanical characterization of shales has grown in recent years, because of their application in the context of energy geotechnics. In the frame of nuclear waste disposal shales are considered as host formations for the placem ...

E D P SCIENCES2020

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

Propagation of fluid driven fractures in transversely isotropic material

Fatima-Ezzahra Moukhtari

The propagation of fluid driven fractures is used in a number of industrial applications (well stimulation of unconventional reservoirs, development of deep geothermal systems) but also occurs naturally (magmatic dyke intrusion). While the mechanics of hyd ...

EPFL2020

Developing a high capacity axis translation apparatus for gas shale testing

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Jinwoo Kim

Gas shales are usually partially saturated due to hydrocarbon generation and often have a low in-situ degree of saturation less than 40 %. During stimulation, substantial fluid imbibition into the formation occurs due to high suction. Recent research on th ...

EDP Sciences2020

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

Microfluidic system for Caenorhabditis elegans culture and oxygen consumption rate measurements

Martinus Gijs, Thomas Lehnert, Matteo Cornaglia, Roger Philippe Krenger

Mitochondrial respiration is a key signature for the assessment of mitochondrial functioning and mitochondrial dysfunction is related to many diseases including metabolic syndrome and aging-associated conditions. Here, we present a microfluidic Caenorhabdi ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2020

Experimental Assessment of the Impact of Partial Saturation On the Mechanical Properties of Gas Shales

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Alberto Minardi

The impact of partial water saturation on the mechanical behaviour of clays and claystones has been widely proved. This work aims at demonstrating that also for gas shales partial water saturation has a significant influ-ence on their stiffness and strengt ...

2019

Quantized Hall Conductance of a Single Atomic Wire: A Proposal Based on Synthetic Dimensions

Jean-Philippe Brantut

We propose a method by which the quantization of the Hall conductance can be directly measured in the transport of a one-dimensional atomic gas. Our approach builds on two main ingredients: (1) a constriction optical potential, which generates a mesoscopic ...

American Physical Society2019

Gas Shales Testing in Controlled Partially Saturated Conditions

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Alberto Minardi

Laboratory measurement of mechanical properties of gas shales represents a challenging topic in geomechanics due to their peculiar features such as heterogeneity, anisotropy, low permeability, and complex physical phenomena related to the hydro-mechanical ...

2018

Laboratory testing of gas shales in unsaturated conditions

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Alberto Minardi

Water uptake of gas shales is commonly considered one of the most important factors responsible for fluid loss during flowback operations after hydraulic fracturing. Imbibition experiments cover a key role in this context to analyze the impact of several f ...

2018

Accounting for near-wellbore fracture behavior to unlock the potential of unconventional gas wells

Brice Tanguy Alphonse Lecampion

Despite ongoing engineering efforts, unconventional horizontal gas wells completed with the multi-stage hydraulic fracturing technique are not yet producing to their full potential, as a meaningful proportion of clusters are producing marginally - if at al ...

2018