On June 30, 2023, Dr. Zhai Lianghao, a young teacher from the School of Exploration and Surveying Engineering of CIT, published a research paper entitled "Experimental Study of Hydraulic Fractures Initiation and Propagation from Perforated Wellbore in Oil Shale Formation" in the top journal of energy and fuel field Fuel with CIT as the first completion unit. Fuel is a TOP journal in the first region of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with a new impact factor of 7.4 after the 2023 update.
In the exploration and development of unconventional oil and gas resources such as oil shale, due to its extremely low porosity and permeability, there have been technical bottlenecks such as the inability to accurately determine the hydraulic fracture propagation path and the the formation of large volume complex fracture networks for a long time, which have seriously affected the process of commercial development.
In this paper, according to the characteristics of the development of the bedding structure of oil shale in China, directional perforation fracturing is proposed to transform the reservoir, and the influence mechanism of different perforation parameters and fracturing fluid parameters on hydraulic fracture propagation behavior is studied by combining true triaxial hydraulic fracturing system and CT scanning technology. Based on the post-processing of the CT scan results, the accurate inversion of the internal crack network structure of the model was realized without damaging the experimental sample, which effectively reduced the impact on the integrity of the experimental sample and the accuracy of the experimental results during the observation of crack morphology.
