Imaging Proppant in a Shallow Hydraulic Fracture Using Ground-Penetrating Radar

Abstract

Hydraulic fracturing has been used to enhance the oil and gas recovery and facilitate remediation of groundwater contaminants, particularly in low-permeability materials such as shales. Fracture geometry can impact the success of these applications, but techniques for imaging how hydraulic fractures grow under different conditions remains limited. In this paper, we evaluate the feasibility of using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to image a hydraulic fracture created at 1.5 m depth using a granular steel proppant. GPR data were collected along multiple transects at the ground surface prior to, during, and after the experiment. The calculated R² value for the correlation between fracture surfaces interpolated from GPR and down-hole measurements is 0.85. This study demonstrates that GPR can be an effective tool for understanding fracture propagation in shallow environments, which may be of high value for both optimizing environmental remediation schemes and developing reservoir analogs.