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Hydrogeological and Geomechanical Evaluation of a Shallow Hydraulic Fracture at the Devine Fracture Pilot Site, Medina County, Texas

UT-Austin’s Devine Fracture Pilot Site (DFPS), 50 miles southwest of San Antonio, Texas, has been targeted for a comprehensive, multidisciplinary development of fracture diagnostics techniques cross-validated by ground-truth data acquisition near a recently created, 175-ft-deep, horizontal hydraulic fracture. To evaluate the fracture-diagnostic techniques at this site, we attempted to develop hydrogeological and geomechanical models on the basis of bottomhole-pressure measurements during injection tests with a predefined volumetric flow-rate profile, resembling a diagnostic fracture injection test (DFIT). History-matching efforts using a simplified layer-cake hydrogeological model resulted in the field-scale formation permeability of 9.87×10^-15-m^2 (10-mD) and Darcy-scale fracture permeability. Analysis of bottomhole pressure and injection-rate history showed that (1) the preexisting horizontal fracture was closed adjacent to the injection well and (2) the initial pump-pressure increase at a negligible volumetric injection rate led to near-well fracture reopening, conductivity increase, and abrupt injection-rate increase. To overcome hydrogeological-model limitations of predicting fracture reopening throughout injection, we extended the modeling to a finite-element, poroelastic analysis of horizontal-fracture growth using a cohesive-zone model. Using this fracture-reopening model, we were able to match the transient-pressure response during the entire experiment by adjusting the hydromechanical properties. The current study lays the foundation for future work that our team will be performing at this well-characterized fracture site.

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Last Updated December 22, 2022, 15:58 (LMT)
Created December 1, 2022, 21:06 (LMT)
Citation Mahdi Haddad, Mohsen Ahmadian, Jun Ge, Seyyed Abolfazl Hosseini, J.-P. Nicot, William Ambrose, Hydrogeological and Geomechanical Evaluation of a Shallow Hydraulic Fracture at the Devine Fracture Pilot Site, Medina County, Texas, 12/1/2022, https://edx.netl.doe.gov/dataset/hydrogeological-and-geomechanical-evaluation-of-a-shallow-hydraulic-fracture-at-the-devine-fracture-pilot-site-medina-county-texas
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