Publication Details

Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.1029/2022JB024509
Licence creative commons licence
Title (Primary) Interactions of hydraulic fractures with grain boundary discontinuities in the near wellbore region
Author Yoshioka, K.; Katou, M.; Tamura, K.; Arima, Y.; Ito, Y.; Chen, Y.; Ishida, T.
Source Titel Journal of Geophysical Research-Solid Earth
Year 2023
Department ENVINF
Volume 128
Issue 3
Page From e2022JB024509
Language englisch
Topic T8 Georesources
Data and Software links https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6390977
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6811452
Supplements https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10.1029%2F2022JB024509&file=2022JB024509-sup-0001-Supporting+Information+SI-S01.zip
Keywords fracture interaction; fracture energy; hydraulic fracture
Abstract Hydraulic fractures often turn or branch, interacting with preexisting discontinuities in the rock mass (e.g., natural fractures or defects). The criteria for fracture penetration or deflection are typically based on the in-situ stress, and the angle and strength of discontinuities. However, in hydraulic fracture experiments on carbonate rocks (Naoi et al., 2020), small scale analyses show that the fractures deflected more frequently at discontinuities (grain boundaries) as they propagated farther from the wellbore, a finding not explained by the conventional criteria. Here, we demonstrate that the energy dissipation of a deflecting fracture increases with the distance from the wellbore, such that a propagating hydraulic fracture more easily deflects at a discontinuity from an energetic standpoint. This tendency was confirmed by hydraulic fracture simulations based on a successive energy minimization approach. Our findings, which show that wellbores appreciably affect the behavior of hydraulic fractures, highlight the importance of energetic stability analysis for determining fracture paths.
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=24471
Yoshioka, K., Katou, M., Tamura, K., Arima, Y., Ito, Y., Chen, Y., Ishida, T. (2023):
Interactions of hydraulic fractures with grain boundary discontinuities in the near wellbore region
J. Geophys. Res.-Solid Earth 128 (3), e2022JB024509 10.1029/2022JB024509