Experimental Investigation of Shale Physical and Transport Properties
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Shale gas represents an important emerging energy supply not only in the United States but across the globe. Proper understanding of the petrophysical properties, future production trends, and behavior of these reservoirs is essential for accurate reserve estimations and recovery factor predictions. Most existing shale gas wells are still considered young and therefore there is a lack of reliable long-term production data. This represents a major challenge for understanding the behavior and long-term productivity of these shale gas reservoirs. This thesis provides a comprehensive overview of shale gas along with porosity, permeability, and excess sorption measurements utilizing the pulse-decay technique to better understand the connectivity and flow mechanism of shale gas rocks. Several experiments were conducted to measure these petrophysical properties using different gasses for possible recovery enhancement techniques. Other experiments were also conducted to measure the effect of depletion of shale gas permeability. One of the main questions addressed is how sensitive are shale physical properties to the gas saturating the pore space? A second question is are we overestimating the gas per unit volume of shale using helium for porosity and permeability measurements? Because of the small size of helium molecules, initial speculation suggested that helium measured porosity is greater than the effective methane porosity leading to overestimated shale pore volumes. Experimental results reported here, however, indicate otherwise. Apparent porosity and permeability measurements were carried out using several gases including He, N2, CH4 and CO2. Apparent porosity measurements showed that helium has the lowest storage capacity in comparison to the gases employed in the experiment. This comparison with different gases also shows a decrease in permeability and effective pore radius as we move from a less to more sorptive gas. Gibb’s excess sorption utilizing the volumetric method is also measured and, in fact, confirms the impact of sorption on shale physical and transport properties.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2013 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Aljamaan, Hamza M. |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Kovscek, Anthony R. |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Energy Resources Engineering |
Subjects
| Subject | School of Earth Energy & Environmental Sciences |
|---|---|
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Aljamaan, Hamza M. (2013). Experimental Investigation of Shale Physical and Transport Properties. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/kr345fx4637
Collection
Master's Theses, Doerr School of Sustainability
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