Publications associées à Oil and gas reserves and resource quantification

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

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

The cis-lunar ecosystem — A systems model and scenarios of the resource industry and its impact

Jean-Paul Richard Kneib

Lunar resources is one of the many new putative business models that may transform space logistics. Yet it competes with Earth-based resources, in a complex trade-off involving both tech development & socioeconomic dynamics. This study models the size vs. ...

2021

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

Observation of methane filled hexagonal ice stable up to 150 GPa

Philippe Gillet, Richard Gaal, Livia Eleonora Bove Kado, Umbertoluca Ranieri

Gas hydrates consist of hydrogen-bonded water frameworks enclosing guest gas molecules and have been the focus of intense research for almost 40 y, both for their fundamental role in the understanding of hydrophobic interactions and for gas storage and ene ...

National Academy of Sciences2019

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

Enough Metals? Resource Constraints to Supply a Fully Renewable Energy System

Vincent Moreau, François Richard Vuille, Piero Carlo Dos Reis

The transition from a fossil fuel base to a renewable energy system relies on materials and, in particular, metals to manufacture and maintain energy conversion technologies. Supply constraints shift from fossil fuels to mineral resources. We assess the av ...

2019

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

The impact of the volumetric swelling behavior on the water uptake of gas shale

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

Hydro-mechanical characterization of gas shales and Opalinus Clay shale in partially saturated conditions

Alberto Minardi

An experimental study on the behaviour of shales in partially water saturated conditions is presented in this thesis. The Opalinus Clay shale and gas shales from different unconventional reservoirs have been studied. Opalinus Clay is currently considered a ...

EPFL2018

Nonlinear elastic response of partially saturated gas shales in uniaxial compression

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Alberto Minardi

Elastic properties of gas shales are fundamental for the geomechanical characterization of unconventional reservoirs. Due to the presence of microcracks, a non-linear elastic behaviour with hysteresis is usually exhibited when gas shales are subjected to u ...

2018

Culture based approaches, dependent and independent, for microbial community fractions in petroleum oil reservoirs

Edgard Gnansounou

Petroleum reservoir is an ecosystem having extreme environmental conditions of temperature, pressure and salinity. They possess highly anoxic conditions. Major microbial communities present in this environment include fermentative bacteria, sulphate reduci ...

NATL INST SCIENCE COMMUNICATION-NISCAIR2018

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

Equilibrium commodity prices with irreversible investment and non-linear technologies

Pierre Collin Dufresne

We model oil price dynamics in a general equilibrium production economy with two goods: a consumption good and oil. Production of the consumption good requires drawing from oil reserves at a fixed rate. Investment necessary to replenish oil reserves is cos ...

2018

Plastic-damage modeling of saturated quasi-brittle shales

Lyesse Laloui, Francesco Parisio

The constitutive modeling of shales is an important topic in the geomechanics community as it is often encountered in advanced applications such as nuclear waste storage, CO2 sequestration, and unconventional oil and gas exploitation. The goal of this work ...

Elsevier2017

Efficient global optimization of reservoir geomechanical parameters based on synthetic aperture radar-derived ground displacements

Francesco Comola

When large volumes of fluids are removed from or injected into underground formations for, e.g., hydrocarbon and water production, CO_2 storage, gas storage, and geothermal energy exploitation, monitoring of surface deformations coupled to numerical modeli ...

Soc Exploration Geophysicists2016

Thermal pumping gas viscometer for Wobbe Index determination

Gaël André Léon Farine

Natural gas is defined as a combustible mixture of hydrocarbons coming from ground deposits and it is mainly used as a source of energy for burners and motors. Its consumption is increasing worldwide, as this represents a cheap and abundant source of energ ...

EPFL2016

Dynamic investigation of nutrient consumption and injection strategy in microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) by means of large-scale experiments

Koen Blanckaert

Microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) depends on the in situ microbial activity to release trapped oil in reservoirs. In practice, undesired consumption is a universal phenomenon but cannot be observed effectively in small-scale physical simulations due t ...

Springer2015