A review on hydraulic fracturing of unconventional reservoir

Abstract

Hydraulic fracturing is widely accepted and applied to improve the gas recovery in unconventional reservoirs. Unconventional reservoirs to be addressed here are with very low permeability, complicated geological settings and in-situ stress field etc. All of these make the hydraulic fracturing process a challenging task. In order to effectively and economically recover gas from such reservoirs, the initiation and propagation of hydraulic fracturing in the heterogeneous fractured/porous media under such complicated conditions should be mastered. In this paper, some issues related to hydraulic fracturing have been reviewed, including the experimental study, field study and numerical simulation. Finally the existing problems that need to be solved on the subject of hydraulic fracturing have been proposed.

Keywords

Hydraulic fracturing / Unconventional reservoirs / Heterogeneity / Numerical method

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