scholarly journals Laboratory Investigation to Assess the Impact of Pore Pressure Decline and Confining Stress on Shale Gas Reservoirs

Author(s):  
Khalil Rehman Memon ◽  
◽  
Abdul Haque Tunio ◽  
Aftan Ahmed Mahesar ◽  
Hafiz-Ur-Rehman Memon ◽  
...  
2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 207-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hongling Zhang ◽  
Jing Wang ◽  
Haiyong Zhang

Shale gas is one of the primary types of unconventional reservoirs to be exploited in search for long-lasting resources. Production from shale gas reservoirs requires horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing to achieve the most economic production. However, plenty of parameters (e.g., fracture conductivity, fracture spacing, half-length, matrix permeability, and porosity,etc) have high uncertainty that may cause unexpected high cost. Therefore, to develop an efficient and practical method for quantifying uncertainty and optimizing shale-gas production is highly desirable. This paper focuses on analyzing the main factors during gas production, including petro-physical parameters, hydraulic fracture parameters, and work conditions on shale-gas production performances. Firstly, numerous key parameters of shale-gas production from the fourteen best-known shale gas reservoirs in the United States are selected through the correlation analysis. Secondly, a grey relational grade method is used to quantitatively estimate the potential of developing target shale gas reservoirs as well as the impact ranking of these factors. Analyses on production data of many shale-gas reservoirs indicate that the recovery efficiencies are highly correlated with the major parameters predicted by the new method. Among all main factors, the impact ranking of major factors, from more important to less important, is matrix permeability, fracture conductivity, fracture density of hydraulic fracturing, reservoir pressure, total organic content (TOC), fracture half-length, adsorbed gas, reservoir thickness, reservoir depth, and clay content. This work can provide significant insights into quantifying the evaluation of the development potential of shale gas reservoirs, the influence degree of main factors, and optimization of shale gas production.


2017 ◽  
Vol 139 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxian B. Seales ◽  
Turgay Ertekin ◽  
John Yilin Wang

At the end of 2015 the U.S. held 5.6% or approximately 369 Tcf of worldwide conventional natural gas proved reserves (British Petroleum Company, 2016, “BP Statistical Review of World Energy June 2016,” British Petroleum Co., London). If unconventional gas sources are considered, natural gas reserves rise steeply to 2276 Tcf. Shale gas alone accounts for approximately 750 Tcf of the technically recoverable gas reserves in the U.S. (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2011, “Review of Emerging Resources: U.S. Shale Gas and Shale Oil plays,” U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, DC). However, this represents only a very small fraction of the gas associated with shale formations and is indicative of current technological limits. This manuscript addresses the question of recovery efficiency/recovery factor (RF) in fractured gas shales. Predictions of gas RF in fractured shale gas reservoirs are presented as a function of operating conditions, non-Darcy flow, gas slippage, proppant crushing, and proppant diagenesis. Recovery factors are simulated using a fully implicit, three-dimensional, two-phase, dual-porosity finite difference model that was developed specifically for this purpose. The results presented in this article provide clear insight into the range of recovery factors one can expect from a fractured shale gas formation, the impact that operation procedures and other phenomena have on these recovery factors, and the efficiency or inefficiency of contemporary shale gas production technology.


SPE Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (06) ◽  
pp. 1739-1759 ◽  
Author(s):  
Y.. Pang ◽  
M. Y. Soliman ◽  
H.. Deng ◽  
Hossein Emadi

Summary Nanoscale porosity and permeability play important roles in the characterization of shale-gas reservoirs and predicting shale-gas-production behavior. The gas adsorption and stress effects are two crucial parameters that should be considered in shale rocks. Although stress-dependent porosity and permeability models have been introduced and applied to calculate effective porosity and permeability, the adsorption effect specified as pore volume (PV) occupied by adsorbate is not properly accounted. Generally, gas adsorption results in significant reduction of nanoscale porosity and permeability in shale-gas reservoirs because the PV is occupied by layers of adsorbed-gas molecules. In this paper, correlations of effective porosity and permeability with the consideration of combining effects of gas adsorption and stress are developed for shale. For the adsorption effect, methane-adsorption capacity of shale rocks is measured on five shale-core samples in the laboratory by use of the gravimetric method. Methane-adsorption capacity is evaluated through performing regression analysis on Gibbs adsorption data from experimental measurements by use of the modified Dubinin-Astakhov (D-A) equation (Sakurovs et al. 2007) under the supercritical condition, from which the density of adsorbate is found. In addition, the Gibbs adsorption data are converted to absolute adsorption data to determine the volume of adsorbate. Furthermore, the stress-dependent porosity and permeability are calculated by use of McKee correlations (McKee et al. 1988) with the experimentally measured constant pore compressibility by use of the nonadsorptive-gas-expansion method. The developed correlations illustrating the changes in porosity and permeability with pore pressure in shale are similar to those produced by the Shi and Durucan model (2005), which represents the decline of porosity and permeability with the increase of pore pressure in the coalbed. The tendency of porosity and permeability change is the inverse of the common stress-dependent regulation that porosity and permeability increase with the increase of pore pressure. Here, the gas-adsorption effect has a larger influence on PV than stress effect does, which is because more gas is attempting to adsorb on the surface of the matrix as pore pressure increases. Furthermore, the developed correlations are added into a numerical-simulation model at field scale, which successfully matches production data from a horizontal well with multistage hydraulic fractures in the Barnett Shale reservoir. The simulation results note that without considering the effect of PV occupied by adsorbed gas, characterization of reservoir properties and prediction of gas production by history matching cannot be performed reliably. The purpose of this study is to introduce a model to calculate the volume of the adsorbed phase through the adsorption isotherm and propose correlations of effective porosity and permeability in shale rocks, including the consideration of the effects of both gas adsorption and stress. In addition, practical application of the developed correlations to reservoir-simulation work might achieve an appropriate evaluation of effective porosity and permeability and provide an accurate estimation of gas production in shale-gas reservoirs.


Energies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 3422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Honghua Tao ◽  
Liehui Zhang ◽  
Qiguo Liu ◽  
Qi Deng ◽  
Man Luo ◽  
...  

The use of multiple hydraulically fractured horizontal wells has been proven to be an efficient and effective way to enable shale gas production. Meanwhile, analytical models represent a rapid evaluation method that has been developed to investigate the pressure-transient behaviors in shale gas reservoirs. Furthermore, fractal-anomalous diffusion, which describes a sub-diffusion process by a non-linear relationship with time and cannot be represented by Darcy’s law, has been noticed in heterogeneous porous media. In order to describe the pressure-transient behaviors in shale gas reservoirs more accurately, an improved analytical model based on the fractal-anomalous diffusion is established. Various diffusions in the shale matrix, pressure-dependent permeability, fractal geometry features, and anomalous diffusion in the stimulated reservoir volume region are considered. Type curves of pressure and pressure derivatives are plotted, and the effects of anomalous diffusion and mass fractal dimension are investigated in a sensitivity analysis. The impact of anomalous diffusion is recognized as two opposite aspects in the early linear flow regime and after that period, when it changes from 1 to 0.75. The smaller mass fractal dimension, which changes from 2 to 1.8, results in more pressure and a drop in the pressure derivative.


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