Investigation of methane mass transfer and sorption in Marcellus shale under variable net-stress

Abstract

Natural gas in shale exists as free and adsorbed gas, subject to prevailing pore pressures and stress conditions. Accordingly, to accurately estimate/predict the shale gas recovery potential, a central requirement is to represent gas transport and sorption behavior under varying stress conditions. The objective of this work is to facilitate the interpretation of laboratory-scale experiments, at relevant conditions, in an attempt to bridge the gap in scales between laboratory- and field-scale observations.We have conducted a series of high-pressure experiments on a full-diameter core sample from the Marcellus shale. These include gas loading (pressure-decay) and depletion (production) experiments with pure methane (CH4) at variable stress conditions to characterize transport and sorption behavior under reservoir-relevant conditions. We have formulated and applied a novel integral model for mass transfer and storage in multi-porosity shale systems that allows us to effectively investigate transport and sorption phenomena: We delineate gas transport by interpreting helium (He) pressure-decay experiments and demonstrate how to use the information gained to calculate the relevant transport coefficients of CH4 and other gases. A separate measurement of the CH4 sorption isotherm on a smaller sample (a shale cube) was interpreted and combined with the transport description to predict the production behavior of CH4 from the experiments with the full-diameter core.Our experiments demonstrate that the representation of sorption hysteresis is crucial for predicting and guiding shale gas production: At the end of both gas production experiments, approximately 20% of the initial gas in place remained in the core. Without accounting for sorption hysteresis, our modeling demonstrates that the CH4 production could be overestimated by 10%. We demonstrate that our integral, triple-porosity model provides an effective approach for the interpretation and prediction of gas transport and sorption behavior during loading and production experiments on shale cores under variable net-stress conditions.In summary, our work combines measurements and modeling of mass transfer and sorption in shales at different scales to validate a characterization approach that facilitates an improved understanding of shale gas production. Furthermore, the triple-porosity model utilized in our work defines a potential pathway for the translation of laboratory-scale experimentation to larger-scale applications.