Cleats are natural opening mode fractures (belonging to meso- to macroporosity) systematically developed in coal bed and occur as two different sets which are at right angle to each other. Characteristically both are subvertical in orientation and perpendicular to the coal bed (Laubach et al. 1998; Clarkson and Bustin 1997). Bunch of subparallel aligned fractures form a set. The subparallel cleats as a set exhibit uniformity in strike within an outcrop or borehole core as well as in regional scale. Within a set, individual cleats behave separately each of which is characteristically three dimensional entity having limited length, depth extension, and width.
The importance of coal beds, being a good gas reservoir, has attracted the attention of geoscientists all over the world to deal with the characteristics and origin of cleat. Knowledge of the properties of cleats is essential, because of their great influence on recovery of methane and the local and regional flow of hydrocarbons and...
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Datta, D.R. (2016). Coal, Cleat System. In: Tiess, G., Majumder, T., Cameron, P. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mineral and Energy Policy. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40871-7_96-1
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