An Innovative Laboratory Method To Measure Pore-Pressure-Dependent Gas Permeability of Shale: Theory and Numerical Experiments

Abstract

Summary This work proposes an innovative laboratory method to measure shale gas permeability as a function of pore pressure, a key parameter for characterizing and modeling gas flow in a shale gas reservoir. The development is based on a solution to 1D gas flow under certain boundary and initial conditions. The details of the theoretical background, including formulations to estimate gas permeability and conceptual design of the test setup, are provided. The advantages of our approach, surpassing the currently available ones, include that it measures gas permeability (as a function of pressure) with a single test run and without any presumption regarding the form of parametric relationship between gas permeability and pore pressure. In addition, our approach allows for estimating both shale permeability and porosity at the same time from the related measurements. Numerical experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed methodology.