Influence of pore pressure to the development of a hydraulic fracture in poroelastic medium

Abstract

In this paper we demonstrate the influence of the pore pressure to the development of a hydraulically-driven fracture in a poroelastic medium. We present a novel numerical model for propagation of a planar hydraulic fracture and prove its correctness by demonstration of the numerical convergence and by comparison with known solutions. The advantage of the algorithm is that it does not require the distinguishing of the fracture's tips and reconstruction of the numerical mesh according to the fracture propagation. Next, we perform a thorough analysis of the interplay of fluid filtration and redistribution of stresses near the fracture. We demonstrate that the fracture length decreases with the increase of the Biot's number (the parameter that determines the contribution of the pore pressure to the stress) and explain this effect by analysing the near-fracture pore pressure, rock deformation and stresses. We conclude, that the correct account for the fluid exchange between the fracture and the rock should be based not only on physical parameters of the rock and fluid, but also on the analysis of stresses near the fracture.