Hydraulic fracturing has received abundant media attention in recent years due to a rapid increase in the use of the technique in combination with horizontal drilling technology to produce oil and gas resources from tight reservoirs. Hydraulic fracturing techniques are also used in a variety of other applications that are unrelated to oil and gas production, including tunnel and dam construction, enhanced geothermal energy, carbon sequestration, groundwater remediation, block cave mining, rock burst mitigation, and water well development.Environmental concerns associated with large-scale hydraulic fracturing in oil and gas reservoirs have resulted in political efforts to ban the technique with legislation now in place in certain states in the US and countries around the world. Concerns include soil and groundwater contamination and induced seismicity. " clear understanding of how hydraulic fracturing techniques are used in various applications is important to avoid unintended consequences of any regulations aimed at hydraulic fracturing in the oil and gas industry. The methodology for each application varies widely in terms of scale, pressures applied, additives, and fracture propagation. Mining rock stress measurements, for instance, focus primarily on the breaking strength of rock, and can be conducted with a small-volume highpressure pump that produces only a few liters/minute. The total volume of water injected may be on the order of tens or hundreds of liters. " typical oil and gas well hydraulic fracture treatment, on the other hand, requires millions of litres of injected proprietary fluid and proppant in order to propagate and maintain the fracture effectively into the reservoir. Though both applications are termed hydraulic fracturing , they differ greatly in terms of potential impacts to the environment. This paper characterizes a range of hydraulic fracturing applications in terms of the objectives, techniques, and potential for environmental concerns associated with the standard
Advances in inflatable packer technology have been made in response to the demands of increasingly severe application environments resulting from deeper and deeper underground mining activities, often in remote locations. These include the development of tools to enable deep high pressure permeability testing and hydraulic fracturing activities such as pre-conditioning for block caving, rockburst mitigation and stress testing. In some cases, oilfield type equipment has been adapted for deep underground drilling activities requiring high pressure waterflow control. All of this was implemented using an Australian developed inflatable packer technology. Future developments of this technology may play a role in shale oil and gas exploration and production as well as hard rock in situ leach mining.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.