Wormhole Formation During Acidizing of Calcite-Cemented Fractures in Gas-Bearing Shales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary A relatively large number of calcite-cemented fractures are present in gas-bearing shale formations. During hydraulic fracturing, some of these fractures will be reactivated and may become important flow paths in the resulting stimulated fracture network. On the other hand, the presence of carbonate lamina on fracture surfaces will have a hindering effect on the transport of shale gas from the matrix toward the wellbore. We investigate numerically the effect of low-pH reactive fluids on such fractures, and show that dissolution of the cement proceeds in a highly nonuniform manner. The morphology of the emerging flow paths (“wormholes”) strongly depends on the thickness of the calcite layer. For thick carbonate layers, a hierarchical, fractal pattern appears, with highly branched wormhole-like channels competing for an available flow. For thin layers, the pattern is much more diffuse, with less-pronounced wormholes that merge easily with each other. Finally, for intermediate thicknesses, we observe a strong attraction between shorter and longer wormholes, which leads to the formation of islands of carbonate lamina surrounded by the dissolved regions. We argue that the wormhole-formation processes are not only important for the increase of shale-gas recovery, but also can be used for retaining the fracture permeability, even in the absence of proppant.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".