Publication
In our study, we investigated the impact of changes in Mode I fracture toughness and stress barriers on fully developed planar, buoyant hydraulic fractures assuming linear elastic hydraulic fracture mechanics. We present scaling-based arguments to predict the interaction type and use numerical simulations to validate our findings. Through a two-dimensional simplification, we estimate the lower limit for the fracture to feel a change in fracture toughness (so-called immediate breakthrough). Our simulations show that this approach only captures the order of magnitude of the toughness jump necessary for immediate breakthrough compared to the actual value due to three-dimensional solid effects, emphasizing their importance in such systems. We show that we can estimate the occurrence of indefinite containment at depth by considering that lateral spreading occurs at an approximately constant height. However, timing predictions in the case of a transient containment suffer from our simplified approach, which cannot model the injection history of the spreading constant height fracture. The same observations regarding immediate breakthrough and indefinite containment hold when considering stress barriers using pressure-scale-based arguments. Our study shows that the required toughness changes for fracture arrest are more significant than the observed values in the field. In contrast, stress barriers with a magnitude of around 1 MPa are generally sufficient to contain buoyant hydraulic fractures indefinitely. Stress barriers, in combination with other arrest mechanisms, are thus the most prominent mitigation factor of buoyant growth in industrially created hydraulic fractures.|Derivation of a 2D simplification to decide how 3D planar buoyant hydraulic fractures interact with changes in the Mode I fracture toughness. Derivation of the scaling for the approximately constant height spreading along a Mode I fracture toughness jump of a buoyant hydraulic fracture. Derivation of the limiting volume and injection rate to contain a buoyant hydraulic fracture below a change in Mode I fracture toughness. First-order estimation of the limits for containment and interaction type of buoyant hydraulic fractures at a change in confining stress. Validation of the derivations and first-order estimations through fully coupled planar 3D simulations of buoyant hydraulic fractures.