Utah FORGE 2-2446: Report on Phase Field Modelling of Near-Wellbore Hydraulic Fracture Nucleation and Propagation

This is a report that describes the modelling of fracture nucleation and propagation in the near-wellbore region to understand the relationship between in situ stress and fracture patterns. A novel phase field formulation is described here, which represents fractures as a diffuse variable, eliminating the need for re-meshing or an element insertion algorithm in modelling. Brief numerical results are also provided to demonstrate the capability of this method. Traditional phase field formulations focused only on fracture propagation; however, this formulation models both nucleation and propagation, extending previous work to hydraulic fracturing and implementing it in the GEOS simulation framework. This work was done as part of Utah FORGE Project 2-2446: "Closing the Loop Between In-situ Stress Complexity and EGS Fracture Complexity."