Simulation of Hydraulic Fracturing for Shale Gas Development

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Unconventional Shale Gas Development (SGD) has the potential to contribute trillions of dollars to Canada’s GDP over the next 30 years; however, significant questions remain about the environmental and public health risks associated with Hydraulic Fracturing (HF)—the enabling technology of SGD. The “Hydraulic Fracture Simulation and Risk” (HF-SR) research and training program will a) develop new knowledge about the mechanics of HF and b) establish the foundations for a comprehensive Risk Assessment and Risk Management (RA/RM) framework for Canada. Together these goals will inform public policy, enable effective risk assessment, and lead to innovative HF practices, which are more economically and environmentally sustainable. The proposed Discovery Grant “Hydraulic Fracture Simulation for Shale Gas Development” will develop computational mechanics knowledge to increase the computationally efficiency of eXtended Finite Element Method (XFEM) HF simulators based by several orders of magnitude. This will be achieved through four milestones: 1) higher-order XFEM approximations; 2) novel Operator Splitting methods; 3) local-global XFEM tip enrichments; and 4) Reduce Order Models. The simulation technology developed through these milestones will be mobilized, in part, through the industry collaborator of a NSERC Strategic grant and other industry partnerships. Knowledge will be mobilized for academics through publications, conferences, and stakeholder workshops. The achievement of these milestones will lead to a suite of simulation technologies that are both sufficiently realistic and fast enough to be used in engineering design and risk assessment. The Discovery Grant will train 24 Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP)—3 Doctoral, 1 Masters, 5 undergraduate cooperative education, and 15 undergraduate research assistant students—each HQP will be an integral member of a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional research and training program. This is a key transformative feature of the HF-SR program. Since HF activities will substantially increase worldwide over the next five years, non-profit organizations, regulators, and industry will need a qualified workforce with expertise from the social sciences and engineering. Furthermore, extensive shale gas resources exist worldwide and are not yet being developed and so Canada will be strategically aligned to leverage HF research and knowledge in developing foreign markets. Over the next five years, this program will inject, at a critical time in SGD, technology, knowledge, and experts needed to realize the economic potential of SGD, while ensuring environmental sustainability and public health.