Environmentally best practices and optmisation in hydraulic fracturing for shale gas/oil development

Contact: Professor Charles Augarde

Project Overview

This EC-funded project involves six European partners and four international partners, from academia and industry.

The project research brings together complementary expertise of our consortium members to gain a better understanding of the physics in hydraulic fracturing (HF) with the final goal to optimize HF practices and to assess the environmental risks related to HF. This requires the development and implementation of reliable models for HF, scaled laboratory tests and available on-site data to validate these models. The key expertise in our consortium is on modelling and simulation of HF and all partners involved pursue different computational approaches. However, we have also some partners in our consortium which focus on scaled laboratory tests and one company which can provide on-site data.

The choice of the best model for HF still remains an open question and this research promises to quantify uncertainties in each model and finally provide a guideline how to choose the best model with respect to a specific output parameter.

The final objective is to employ these models in order to answer some pressing questions related to environmental risks of HF practices, including:

• How does HF interact with the natural fractures that intersect the shale seam?
• How does the fracture network from a previous stage of HF treatment affect the fracture network evolution in succeeding, adjacent stages?
• What are the requirements to constrain fractures from propagating to the adjacent layers of confining rock? The exchange and training objectives are to: 
  • Enhance the intersectoral and interdisciplinary training of ERs and ESRs in Computational Science, Mining Geotechnics, Geomechanics, Modeling and Simulation
  • Strengthen, quantitatively and qualitatively, the human potential in research and technology in Europe
  • Advance the scientific contribution of women researchers in this area dominated by male
  • Create synergies with other EU projects
  • Enable and support all ESRs/ERs to keep contact with international community in the sense of training and transfer of knowledge

MSCA-RISE-2016 Research and Innovation Staff Exchange Project ID 734370

Start date 1 January 2017 - End date 31 October 2022
Funded under H2020-EU.1.3.3.
Overall budget € 1 930 500

Coordinated by BAUHAUS-UNIVERSITAET WEIMAR, Germany

Training Engineers and Researchers to Rethink geotechnical Engineering for a low carbon future (TERRE)

Durham Lead: Professor Charles Augarde

Durham Co-Investigators: Professor David Toll (Emeritus), Professor Paul Hughes - (GEER node)

Durham ESRs: Dr Sravan Muguda-Viswanath, Miss Alessia Cuccurullo (currently based at UPPA) 

Project Overview

2015-2019 - Marie Sklodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network

TERRE aims to develop novel geo-technologies to address the competitiveness challenge of the European construction industry in a low carbon agenda. It will be delivered through an inter-sectoral and intra-European coordinated PhD programme focused on carbon-efficient design of geotechnical infrastructure.

Industry and Research in the construction sector have been investing significantly in recent years to produce innovative low-carbon technologies. However, little innovation has been created in the geo-infrastructure industry, which is lagging behind other construction industry sectors.

TERRE aims to close this gap through a network-wide training programme carried out by a close collaboration of eleven Universities and Research Centres and three SMEs. It is structured to provide a balanced combination of fundamental and applied research and will eventually develop operational tools such as software for low-carbon geotechnical design and a Decision Support System for infrastructure project appraisal.

The research fellows will be involved in inter-sectoral and intra-European projects via enrolment in 8 ‘Joint-Awards’ and 7 ‘Industrial’ PhDs. The research fellows will be trained in low-carbon design by developing novel design concepts including eco-reinforced geomaterials, ‘engineered’ vegetation, engineered soil-atmosphere interfaces, biofilms, shallow geothermal energy and soil carbon sequestration. Distinctive features of TERRE are the supervision by an inter-sectoral team and the orientation of the research towards technological applications.

Training at the Network level includes the development of entrepreneurial skills via a special programme on ‘Pathways to Research Enterprise’ to support the research fellows in establishing and leading spin-out companies after the end of the project.