Simulation of Shale Gas Flow in Nano Pores with Parallel Lattice Boltzmann Method

Abstract

Due to the complex pore structures with a large portion of nano pores, flow mechanics of shale gas in organic-rich shale kerogen pores may involve in some nanoscale effects that could not be accounted for by classic Darcy’s law. In this study, we present a parallel lattice Boltzmann method (PLBM) to study these effects and to simulate 3D flow process of natural gas in real pore geometry of a shale reservoir rock. The numerical advantages of LBM make it a powerful tool to simulate gas flow in such nano pores. The new parallel implementation with standard Message Passing Interface (MPI) communication routines has been well tested. By simulating the flow process of shale gas in a tube model and real geometry of shale core through PLBM on high performance computing cluster, the results show that many factors (such as rarefaction effect, slippage effect and roughness effect, etc.) have a great impact on the flow process of shale gas in nano pores and LBM is an effective way to simulate shale gas flow in kerogen pores, and compared to other physical experimental methods, it has great convenience and accuracy.