Fractures and fracturing: Hydraulic fracturing in jointed rock

Abstract

Rock in situ is arguably the most complex material encountered in any engineering discipline. Deformed and fractured over many millions of years and different tectonic stress regimes, it contains fractures on a wide variety of length scales from microscopic to tectonic plate boundaries. Hydraulic fractures, sometimes on the scale of hundreds of meters, may encounter such discontinuities on several scales. Developed initially as a technology to enhance recovery from petroleum reservoirs, hydraulic fracturing is now applied in a variety of subsurface engineering applications. Often carried out at depths of kilometers, the fracturing process cannot be observed directly. Early analyses of the hydraulic fracturing process assumed that a single fracture developed symmetrically from the packed off-pressurized interval of a borehole in a stressed elastic continuum. It is now recognized that this is often not the case. Pre-existing fractures can and do have a significant influence on fracture development, and on the associated distributions of increased fluid pressure and stresses in the rock. Given the usual lack of information and/or uncertainties concerning important variables such as the disposition and mechanical properties of pre-existing fracture systems and properties, rock mass permeabilities, in-situ stress state at the depths of interest, fundamental questions as to how a propagating fracture is affected by encounters with pre-existing faults, etc., it is clear that design of hydraulic fracturing treatments is not an exact science. Fractures in fabricated materials tend to occur on a length of scale that is small; of the order of the ’grain size’ of the material. Increase in the size of the structure does not introduce new fracture sets.