THE USE OF THE FRACTURE REOPENING PRESSURE IN HYDRAULIC FRACTURING STRESS MEASUREMENTS

Practitioners of the hydraulic fracture stress measurement technique commonly estimate the hydraulic fracture tensile strength as the difference between the initial formation breakdown pressure and the fracture reopening pressure. This method, first suggested by Bredehoeft et al. (1976), was developed with the assumption that the stress state in the cracked formation is identical to the stress state in the uncracked formation. In this paper, a relationship for the fracture reopening pressure based on Linear Elastic Fracture Mechanics is developed that takes the hydraulically induced fracture into account. Situations in which the Bredehoeft technique can be appropriately applied are presented.