Interaction between slick water and gas shale and its impact on methane desorption: a case study of Longmaxi member shale formation in the northeast of Chongqing, China

Abstract

Well shut-in time significantly affects the production performance of shale-gas-well. However, interaction between shale powders and fracking fluid on methane desorption has been rarely reported. In this work, based on the volume method following Boyle’s law under higher pressure, the experimental setup was conducted to obtain the adsorption and desorption isotherms to explore the effect of different shut-in times (including 0, 1, 3, 5, 10, and 30 days) on methane desorption. We fitted the methane adsorption and desorption isotherms by the Freundlich model, and the results show that the interaction can obviously impact desorption isotherm, desorption efficiency and adsorbed phase methane content. The inflection points of the constant k and n reduction curves, desorption efficiency reduction curve and adsorbed gas content reduction curve all occur when the interaction time is to 10 days, indicating that 10 days is the best value for the interaction between slick water and gas shale. The results provide an essential supplement that can help elucidate the impact of shut-in time on gas-shale-well production performance experimentally.