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Executive Summary
Pages 1-10

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From page 1...
... They can act as hydraulic conductors, providing pathways for fluid flow or barriers that prevent flow across them. Many petroleum, gas, geothermal, and water supply reservoirs form in fractured rocks.
From page 2...
... The requirements vary from site to site and from application to application. Chapters 2 through 5 address methods for locating and characterizing hydraulically conductive fractures through a combination of geological mapping, geomechanical analysis, and geophysical and hydrological measurements.
From page 3...
... Indeed, most of the error involved in predicting flow behavior with a numerical model is usually due to deficiencies in the underlying conceptual models. A numerical model provides quantitative estimates of flow and transport behavior of the system described by the conceptual model.
From page 4...
... Development of a numerical model should be an iterative process. It begins with the development of a conceptual model, which, in turn, is used to formulate a numerical model of the flow system.
From page 5...
... Heavily characterized sites are ideal for experiments in fluid flow and chemical transport and for investigating the coupling between flow, stress, and temperature because the interpretation of such an experiment is much more certain when the site is well understood. Such experiments are needed because existing numerical models for predicting the effects of stress, flow, temperature, and multiple flow phases do not provide reliable long-term predictions of flow and transport.
From page 6...
... Research should be supported to develop realistic conceptual models for fracture systems. This research should identify commonly applicable relationships between rock type, stress, structure, fracture style, and flow and transport behavior.
From page 7...
... Research is needed to determine how the geometry of fractures determines the relative importance of preferential flow paths and the surface area affecting matrix diffusion and reactive transport. Development of realistic conceptual models for multiphase fluid flow (flow involving more than one fluid phase, e.g., water and steam)
From page 8...
... This effort should include research to relate various geophysical properties of fractures to flow properties. The effect of fractures on the propagation of shear waves (waves that cause particle motions perpendicular to the direction of wave propagation through the rock)
From page 9...
... Numerical models that provide simplified but adequate representations of complex fracture networks should be developed. Studies that identify appropriate ways to group features of the fracture network into simpler equivalent features are needed.
From page 10...
... This scaling work has important applications in evaluating engineering projects with long design lives such as nuclear waste repositories and dams, where slow changes may be hard to predict based on short-term testing and evaluation schemes. It also has applications in engineering projects and petroleum and geothermal reservoirs, where extreme changes in pressure, temperature, and chemistry can lead to large changes in coupled behavior.


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