ABSTRACT
Hydraulic fracturing has become critical to unlock the enormous reserve of gas contained in large deposits of shales throughout the world. However, numerical models that were developed to design hydraulic fracturing treatments for conventional reservoirs are not applicable for the stimulation of gas shales. The work presented in this paper documents a first step to developing a new generation of numerical models, which are capable of accounting for the many discontinuities present in the shales that interact with the hydraulic fracture.
