Recent years, to facilitate the flow and transport of hydrocarbons to wells, the hydraulic fracturing technology is widely used in unconventional geological resources with extreme low in-situ permeability to increase formation permeability. However, it’s found that, fracture permeability decreases sharply during the development of reservoirs caused by the increase of effective stress. Specifically, due to effective stress, proppant embedment and compaction occurs in the fractures, leading to the decrease of fracture permeability. In this paper, we focus on developing a reasonable theoretical model to determine the essential controls on proppant embedment and compaction. In addition, we will study the stress dependent permeability of fractures. Results suggest that the predictions from our developed model agree well with the available experimental data presented in the literature. In addition, proppant embedment and compaction will be affected by effective stress, rock lithology parameters, proppant size as well as proppant lithology parameters, etc. Our proposed model can reveal the mechanisms that affect proppant embedment-compaction in hydraulic fractures.
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