Project members (left to right): Mark McGinley, James Guzek, Junjing Zhang, Dr. Ding Zhu, Timothy Jansen, Paola Perez, Kathryn Briggs, and Dr. Dan Hill. Members not shown: Anton Kamenov (graduated) and Dante Guerra.
In 2012, RPSEA, the Research Partnership to Secure Energy for America, funded a project involving Advanced Hydraulic Fracturing Technology for Unconventional Tight Gas Reservoirs and granted it to the Texas A&M Department of Petroleum Engineering, with professors Ding Zhu and Dan Hill as the principal investigators.
This project focuses on how the conductivity of the sedimentary rock behaves differently for different shale formations. Tight gas/oil refers to the fact that hydrocarbon located within these ultra-low permeability reservoirs is not easily extracted. The targeted formations within the scope of this research are Barnett shale, Fayetteville shale, Eagle Ford shale and Marcellus shale.
The study began with collecting rock samples from each formation and then progressed to running fracture conductivity tests and measuring rock mechanics properties. This led to developing an understanding of and creating simple methods to predict fracture conductivity behavior based on the rock mechanical and mineralogical properties as well as the fracturing design. Over the last two years, this research has attracted many talented students from different backgrounds to the petroleum engineering department, especially U.S. students from other disciplines. These students bring fresh ideas and strong research backgrounds with them, which greatly enhance the progress of the research project.
Over the last two years, the project funding has supported eight graduate students who came from the United States, China, Columbia and Bulgaria. These students work on the research as a team but individually target a specific aspect of it for their thesis or dissertation. In return, the project provided them a graduate degree along with hydraulic fracture knowledge, honed researching abilities, and strong teamwork skills.
The students are: Mark McGinley, bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, Penn State; Kathryn Briggs, bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, Boston University; James Guzek, bachelor's degree in environmental engineering, Cornell University; Junjing Zhang, master's degree and bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering, China Petroleum University; Timothy Jansen, bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering, Texas A&M University; Paola Perez, bachelor's degree in industrial engineering, Columbia; and Dante Guerra, master's and bachelor's degree in civil engineering, Ohio State University.