Hydraulic fracturing in mass mining: inflatable packer practice and safety notes
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

First reported on International Mining – News
30 Second Briefing
Hydraulic fracturing is being deployed in deep hard-rock metal mines to precondition highly stressed, brittle rock masses and manage hazards such as rock bursts, violent spalling and blocky cave propagation around large excavations. Operations are using multi-stage HF in long blastholes and dedicated boreholes to weaken ore columns, improve caveability and reduce unplanned dilution, with fracture geometry controlled by in-situ stress orientation and rock fabric. Inflatable packers are central to field practice, isolating specific intervals, enabling controlled pressure build-up, and allowing repeated treatments in the same borehole without grout-based sealing.
Technical Brief
- Inflatable packers are typically deployed as single- or multi-packer strings to isolate multiple treatment intervals per borehole.
- Mining HF packers use reinforced elastomer sleeves and steel mandrels rated for several tens of MPa inflation pressure.
- Double-packer configurations allow precise control of fracture initiation depth by confining fluid between two inflated elements.
- Packers are commonly run on steel tubing or high-pressure hose, enabling real-time pressure and flow monitoring at surface.
- Repeated inflate–deflate cycles in the same borehole reduce personnel exposure to re-drilling or re-entering hazardous headings.
- HF campaigns are usually integrated with microseismic arrays and stress monitoring to verify fracture growth and manage seismic hazard.
- Operational safety relies on strict pressure limits, lock-out/tag-out on pumps, and exclusion zones around high-pressure lines.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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