LifeItself

 This is a continuation of the previous list of 29 papers and 1 patent: 30. Zhu, W., Khirevich, S., & Patzek, T. W. (2021). Impact of fracture geometry and topology on the connectivity and flow properties of stochastic fracture networks.  Water Resources Research , 57, e2020WR028652.  https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR028652 Natural fractures usually comprise complex networks and control many physical properties of rocks, including stiffness, strength, and permeability. Therefore, they significantly impact many engineering fields, such as hydrology, waste disposal, geothermal exploitation, and petroleum reservoir exploitation. In a low permeability formation, fractures play a dominant role because the contribution of the matrix to fluid flow is almost negligible. Connectivity of natural and induced fractures thus determines the overall capability of fluid flow of subsurface rocks. Commonly used approaches to evaluate the connectivity (percolation method, connectivity ind...

An ocean of ink has already been spilled on pros and cons of using Hubbert curves to model production from a large collection of wells in one or many reservoirs.  In 2010, I published together with my last graduate student in Berkeley, Dr. Greg Croft, a highly cited paper on this subject. I have also commented multiple times in this blog on the different aspects of the Hubbert curve analysis, its limitations, and predictive power. Since I cannot out-talk or out-convince the numerous critics of this type of analysis, let me give you a simple example of its robustness. This particular story is as follows.  At the end of the year 2010, Greg Fenves, at that time Dean of UT's Cockrell School of Engineering in Austin, asked me to make a presentation to the School's Engineering Advisory Board (EAB).  Using the results of our recent paper with Greg Croft, I chose to speak about my new work on unconventional resources in the U.S.  On April 09, 2011, I made the presentation...