Transverse Hydraulic Fracture Initiation: Insights from Intermediate-Scale Hydraulic Fracture Tests

TL;DR

This study presents new experimental insights into hydraulic fracture initiation and propagation in complex stress fields, based on intermediate-scale tests in deep underground boreholes, comparing results with existing models and prior studies.

Contribution

Provides novel experimental data from deep underground hydraulic fracture tests, enhancing understanding of fracture behavior in non-uniform stress fields and validating previous models.

Findings

Hydraulic fractures tend to initiate and propagate in complex patterns influenced by local stress variations.

Experimental results show good agreement with some numerical models, but also reveal discrepancies in fracture propagation paths.

Data improves understanding of hydraulic fracture behavior in geothermal and unconventional reservoir contexts.

Abstract

In a uniform stress field, a tensile hydraulic fracture will favor propagation in the plane formed by the maximum (most compressive) and intermediate principal stresses. For the propagation of hydraulic fractures in non-uniform stress fields, especially those where the principal stress directions change spatially, things become much more complex, are less well understood, and therefore are more difficult to predict. Such is often the case when a hydraulic fracture is initiated from a borehole drilled in the direction of the minimum principal stress. This is a well-known problem that has been the subject of several numerical and experimental studies. The purpose of this paper is to offer new insights from a series of hydraulic fracture tests conducted in sub-horizontal boreholes drilled in the Sanford Underground Research Facility. This project, called the Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) Collab project, has developed a test bed at a depth of approximately 1478 meters underground consisting of sub-horizontal injection, production, and monitoring wells. This paper presents stimulation test data, and supporting geologic/geophysical characterization data. The test data are compared to previous numerical and experimental studies to determine how well this new experimental data compares with previous modeling, laboratory, and field tests.