SPE is pleased to invite you to the presentation hosted by
GEOLOG of
Professor Alberto Guadagnini, Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano and Adjunct Professor of The University of Arizona, Tucson.
Presentation Abstract
This presentation will show some of the main results, stemming from the application of a probabilistic approach for the quantification of the environmental risk associated with hydraulic fracturing operation. Our analyses are grounded on a set of focused scenarios which are developed within the context of the EU H2020 project FracRisk. The latter is keyed to (a) the quantification of the environmental impact of hydraulic fracturing technologies and (b) the development of decision support tools for the quantification of environmental risk. A significant segment of the study is devoted to the probabilistic modeling of risk scenarios during and following fracturing operations. The main aspects characterizing these scenarios include the pattern of the subsurface circulation of the fracturing fluid, the migration of methane, as well as the geomechanics of the development of fractures.
Here, we consider two well defined scenarios: (a) scenario S2 targets the possibility that the fracturing fluid escapes from the fractured schistose formation to migrate towards shallow aquifer bodies; (b) scenario S4 analyzes the migration path connecting the source of the fracturing fluid and a potential receptor through discontinuities such as, for example, a fault zone.
Due to the computational burden associated with the numerical solution of the complete set of equations governing the dynamics of the scenarios considered, we resort to formulating the system behavior through a low complexity (or surrogate) model. The latter is then used to support global sensitivity analysis aiming at identifying the relative importance of (typically uncertain) model parameters on target model outputs which can be used to characterize the environmental signature of the fracturing operations. In addition to the classical Sobol’ indices, we consider here the global sensitivity metrics suggested by Dell’Oca et al. (2017) to quantify the impact of model parameter uncertainties on statistical moments driving key features of the structure of the probability density function (pdf) of model outputs.
Our results allow identifying the relative importance of the uncertainty of the various model parameters/inputs on the first four (statistical) moments (i.e., mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis) of the pdf of the environmental response of interest.
Event Agenda:
17:00 – 17:30 Guests accreditation
17:30 – 18:15 Lecture prof Guadagnini (PoliMi)
18:15 – 18:30 Q&A session
18:30 – 19:00 Short Visit of Geolog premises
19:00 – 20:00 Refreshment
If you would like to join on line follow this
link.
Professor Alberto Guadagnini Biography
Prof. Alberto Guadagnini (Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy) is Professor of Hydraulic Engineering and Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (DICA) at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He is also Adjunct Professor at the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA. He has been Professeur Invité at the University of Strasbourg (Strasbourg, France) in 2010, Visiting Professor at the Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, The University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona, USA, in 1997, and 2010 - 2016, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences and Energy Research, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel, in 2011.
Research activities span both theoretical/numerical and experimental projects, being focused on subsurface flow dynamics, parameter estimation, inverse modeling, geostatistics, stochastic analyses of flow and transport problems, and uncertainty quantification in groundwater systems, from the pore- to the laboratory-, field- and basin-scale. He contributed to the development of exact and approximated formalisms for prediction of groundwater flow and transport processes.
Ongoing research projects include:
- delineation of wellhead protection regions
- multiscale flow and solute transport in porous and fractured media
- multiphase flows and enhanced oil recovery
- environmental footprint of shale gas development.
He has participated in several European Union projects and proposals (Coordinator; Supervisory Board member; and PI/scientist-in-charge).
He published more than 150 research papers in ISI rated, international, peer-reviewed journals. He has a total of >2000 citations.
He is Executive Editor of the Journal “Hydrology and Earth System Sciences”, and Associate Editor of the Journals “Water Resources Research” and “Stochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment”.