Production of Natural Gas and Fluid Flow in Tight Sand Reservoirs

Abstract

This document reports progress of this research effort in identifying possible relationships and defining dependencies between macroscopic reservoir parameters strongly affected by microscopic flow dynamics and production well performance in tight gas sand reservoirs. Based on a critical review of the available literature, a better understanding of the main weaknesses of the current state of the art of modeling and simulation for tight sand reservoirs has been reached. Progress has been made in the development and implementation of a simple reservoir simulator that is still able to overcome some of the deficiencies detected. The simulator will be used to quantify the impact of microscopic phenomena in the macroscopic behavior of tight sand gas reservoirs. Phenomena such as, Knudsen diffusion, electro-kinetic effects, ordinary diffusion mechanisms and water vaporization are being considered as part of this study. To date, the adequate modeling of gas slippage in porous media has been determined to be of great relevance in order to explain unexpected fluid flow behavior in tight sand reservoirs.