Sigra designs hydrofracture systems for the purpose of stimulating flow from tight formations, including coal seams and other tight reservoirs. It can also design hydrofracture programmes to break up rock masses, such as for block cave mining operations, or for bench splitting to achieve quiet excavation.
One of the company’s patented innovations is the use of drilling adjacent to a coal seam or other reservoir formation, and using multiple hydrofractures to connect the borehole to the reservoir. This has particular advantages where the reservoir is too weak to support a borehole, or because casing cannot be used because the reservoir is a coal seam that will be mined in the future.
Sigra’s strength in the area of hydrofracture design is its capability in geomechanics. In particular, its ability to determine the state of stress in a rock mass provides one of the keys to determining the initiation pressure for hydrofracture, and the direction in which the fracture will progress through various stratigraphic layers. Through its rock mechanics laboratory Sigra has the ability to determine the rock properties needed in hydrofracture modelling.
Sigra uses industry standard hydrofracture numerical modelling.