EVALUATION OF HYDRAULIC FRACTURING FOR  RESERVOIR DEVELOPMENT

Christopher Brown

The deep subsurface serves as a vast resource for numerous activities, with applications ranging from disposal of hazardous waste to recovery of hydrocarbons for energy production. Within the United States, more than 80% of the energy consumed annually is supplied from or enabled by the subsurface. Much of this is driven by developments in drilling and stimulation technologies, such as hydraulic fracturing, which are transforming the way we access the subsurface. The use of tracers to understand the development of hydraulically induced fractures has been a focus of research efforts for decades; however, there continue to be issues correlating results from bench-scale experiments to field tests when analyzing tracers in flowback fluids, as many laboratory tests have used field-relevant materials that were processed such that they no longer represented the physical whole rock configuration of the reservoir. Although more than fifty years of research has gone into engineering reservoirs and testing tracers in subsurface settings, there is still much to be learned. Therefore, this dissertation focuses on assessing the safety and efficacy of deploying hydraulic fracturing for reservoir development and creating new tracer packages to better understand surface area and fluid flow in deep subsurface systems. To facilitate this, the following objectives were explored: • Objective 1 (Chapter 2): demonstrate the value of rare earth elements as deep subsurface tracers by reviewing their chemistry in brine; discussing their occurrence, abundance, and distribution; reviewing their use as geochemical tracers; and evaluating the potential for recovering them from geothermal fluids, including a simple techno-economic analysis to determine the efficacy of mining rare earth elements (REEs) from geothermal brines. • Objective 2 (Chapter 3): demonstrate a novel, yet simple approach to characterize fractures and monitor subsurface fluid flow using rare earth elements. • Objective 3 (Chapter 4): present a review of existing studies in combination with new modeling results to demonstrate the potential benefits of utilizing hydraulic fracturing to improve the performance of carbon storage reservoirs. • Objective 4 (Chapter 5): discuss the benefits of hydraulic fracturing with respect to energy and economic development, including a brief synopsis of some of the primary environmental concerns associated with the practice.

EVALUATION OF HYDRAULIC FRACTURING FOR RESERVOIR DEVELOPMENT

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