Poroelastic Effects in the Hydraulic Fracturing

Hydraulic fracturing is the process of creating a fracture due to pumping a highly pressurized fluid in a rock formation through a wellbore that is used for intensification of hydrocarbon production. Compared to the classical models of brittle fractures, hydraulic fracture theory describes the fluid flow within the fracture coupled with the fracture opening and propagation, exchange of the fracturing fluid with the pore fluid, influence of the pore pressure on the stresses, etc. In the talk we present our recent development in the modelling of the hydraulic fracture dynamics in a poroelastic medium. The topics include: a numerical algorithm for a simulation of the planar hydraulic fracture propagation in the Biot poroelastic medium; an analysis of the influence of the pore pressure on the dynamics of the fracture; use of non-stationary processes for the determination of fracture's and reservoir's parameters; estimation of the debit of a multiply fractured horizontal wellbore. The contents of the talk is based on the publications.