Seepage pathway assessment for natural gas to shallow groundwater during well stimulation, in production, and after abandonment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Hydraulic fracture stimulation (HFS) of unconventional oil and gas reservoirs is of public concern with respect to fugitive gas emissions, fracture height growth, induced seismicity, and groundwater quality changes. We evaluate the potential pathways of fugitive gas seepage during stimulation, in production, and after abandonment; we conclude that the quality of the casing installations is the major concern with respect to future gas migration. The pathway outside the casing is of particular concern as it likely leads to many wells leaking natural gas from thin intermediate-depth gas zones rather than from the deeper target reservoirs. These paths must be understood, likely cases identified, and the probability of leakage mitigated by methods such as casing perforation and squeeze, expanding packers of long life, and induced leakoff into saline aquifers. HFS itself appears not to be a significant risk, with two exceptions. These occur during the high-pressure stage of HFS when (1) legacy well casings are intersected by fracturing fluids and when (2) these fluids pressurize nearby offset wells that have not been shut in, particularly offset wells in the same formation that are surrounded by a region of pressure depletion in which the horizontal stresses are also diminished. This paper focuses on the issue of gas migration from deeper than the surface casing that occurs outside the casing caused by geomechanical processes associated with cement shrinkage, and we review the origin of the gas pulses recorded in noise logs, landowner wells, and surface-casing vents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".