Investigating Gas–Adsorption, Stress–Dependence, and Non–Darcy–Flow Effects on Gas Storage and Transfer in Nanopores by Use of Simplified Local Density Model

Abstract

Summary As an unconventional rock, shale contains all the features of coalbed and tight sandstone specified as gas-adsorption capacity, microscale and nanoscale porosity, and extremely low permeability. The gas-storage mechanism of shale rocks not only is dominated by free gas in macropores and natural fractures, but also is controlled by adsorbed gas in microporous organic matter (kerogen) and clay minerals. Furthermore, Darcy's law is no longer applicable to describe gas transport in nanopores (Javadpour 2009; Wu et al. 2015). Therefore, developing a reliable model to calculate effective porosity and permeability in nanopores considering the effects of gas adsorption, stress dependence, and non-Darcy flow is crucial to characterize properties of shale-gas reservoirs and explain gas-flow behavior in nanopores. In this study, the simplified local density (SLD) model, which has been successfully applied to analyze gas adsorption on coal, activated carbon, and shale in recent studies, is used to analyze methane-adsorption data measured from five shale-core plugs in the laboratory (Mohammad et al. 2011; Chareonsuppanimit et al. 2012; Clarkson and Haghshenas 2016). A new approach to determine the thickness of adsorbed gas dependent on the density profile of the SLD model is proposed, which in turn provides the correction of methane adsorption to pore volume (PV). Furthermore, stress-dependence effect is incorporated into the gas-adsorption effect to generate an effective porosity function in shale rocks. In addition, non-Darcy-flow effect on gas transfer in nanopores is derived from the slit-shaped pore geometry of the SLD model and is represented by a weighted sum of second-order gas slippage and Knudsen diffusion. Consequently, the effective permeability is established as a function of the effects of gas adsorption, stress dependence, and non-Darcy flow. Moreover, the functions of effective porosity and permeability are incorporated into a numerical simulator to perform history matching for gas-production data from a horizontal well with multistage hydraulic fractures in a Barnett Shale reservoir. The simulation results properly match the gas-production data at the field scale. Finally, sensitivity studies on gas adsorption, stress dependence, and non-Darcy-flow effects are conducted to investigate their contributions to evaluating and estimating gas production from shale-gas reservoirs. The results of this study suggest that gas adsorption and non-Darcy-flow effects are two competitive aspects that have major influences on shale-gas production. The developed model including gas-adsorption, stress-dependence, and non-Darcy-flow effects provides insight into the characterization of rock properties and the description of gas-transport behavior in shale-gas reservoirs.