In the creep tests, stress is no longer a constant and increases gradually under the influence of damage occurring during accelerating creep, which is a slow-loading process rather than a conventional creep. With the accumulation of the damage over time, the actual stress increases greatly. The increased actual stress not only generates loading strain but also causes the steady creep rate to rise. This coupling possibly explains why salt rock presents nonlinear accelerating characteristics at the accelerating creep stage. In this work, the constraint of the present creep concept was overcome by assuming that the acceleration creep phase is a coupling process of loading and creeping. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the total strain in this phase is equal to the sum of loading strain and creeping strain. A new nonlinear constitutive equation for creep was then derived, and the mechanisms underlying the nonlinear accelerating characteristics emerging at the stage of accelerating creep are further explained. A step-loading experiment on salt rock was performed for a period of six months. The characteristics of accelerating creep appeared in the last step of loading. This new nonlinear creep damage constitutive model was used to fit and analyze the test data. Obtained results show that this model fits well to these test data and also favorably represents the nonlinear characteristics of accelerating creep, thus supporting the model’s validity.

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Since the 1800s, natural gas has been extracted from wells drilled into conventional reservoirs. Today, gas is also extracted from shale using high-volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF). These wells sometimes leak methane and must be re-sealed with cement. Some researchers argue that methane concentrations, C, increase in groundwater near shale-gas wells and that "fracked" wells leak more than conventional wells. We developed techniques to mine datasets of groundwater chemistry in Pennsylvania townships where contamination had been reported. Values of C measured in shallow private water wells were discovered to increase with proximity to faults and to conventional, but not shale-gas, wells in the entire area. However, in small subareas, C increased with proximity to some shale-gas wells. Data mining was used to map a few hotspots where C significantly correlates with distance to faults and gas wells. Near the hotspots, 3 out of 132 shale-gas wells (~2%) and 4 out of 15 conventional wells (27%) intersect faults at depths where they are reported to be uncased or uncemented. These results demonstrate that even though these data techniques do not establish causation, they can elucidate the controls on natural methane emission along faults and may have implications for gas well construction.

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