Publications Details

Final Report for LDRD: The Effect of Proppant Placement on Closure of Fractured Shale Gas Wells

Ingraham, Mathew D.; Bolintineanu, Dan S.; Rao, Rekha R.; Mondy, L.A.; Lechman, Jeremy B.; Quintana, Enrico C.; Bauer, Stephen J.

The recent boom in the oil and natural gas industry of hydraulic fracture of source rocks has caused a new era in oil and gas production worldwide. However, there are many parts of this process that are poorly understood and thus hard to control. One of the few things that can be controlled is the process of injection to create the fractures in the subsurface and the subsequent injection of proppants to maintain the permeability of the fractured formation, allowing hydrocarbons to be extracted. The goal of this work was to better understand the injection process and resulting proppant distribution in the fracture through a combination of lab-scale experiments and computational models.