Detang Lu

Simulation of Gas Transport in Tight/Shale Gas Reservoirs by a Multicomponent Model Based on PEBI Grid

The ultra-low permeability and nanosize pores of tight/shale gas reservoir would lead to non-Darcy flow including slip flow, transition flow, and free molecular flow, which cannot be described by traditional Darcy’s law. The organic content often adsorbs some gas content, while the adsorbed amount for different gas species is different. Based on these facts, we develop a new compositional model based on unstructured PEBI (perpendicular bisection) grid, which is able to characterize non-Darcy flow including slip flow, transition flow, and free molecular flow and the multicomponent adsorption in tight/shale gas reservoirs. With the proposed model, we study the effect of non-Darcy flow, length of the hydraulic fracture, and initial gas composition on gas production. The results show both non-Darcy flow and fracture length have significant influence on gas production. Ignoring non-Darcy flow would underestimate 67% cumulative gas production in lower permeable gas reservoirs. Gas production increases with fracture length. In lower permeable reservoirs, gas production increases almost linearly with the hydraulic fracture length. However, in higher permeable reservoirs, the increment of the former gradually decreases with the increase in the latter. The results also show that the presence of CO2 in the formation would lower down gas production.

Effect of Matrix-Wellbore Flow and Porosity on Pressure Transient Response in Shale Formation Modeling by Dual Porosity and Dual Permeability System

A mathematical dual porosity and dual permeability numerical model based on perpendicular bisection (PEBI) grid is developed to describe gas flow behaviors in shale-gas reservoirs by incorporating slippage corrected permeability and adsorbed gas effect. Parametric studies are conducted for a horizontal well with multiple infinite conductivity hydraulic fractures in shale-gas reservoir to investigate effect of matrix-wellbore flow, natural fracture porosity, and matrix porosity. We find that the ratio of fracture permeability to matrix permeability approximately decides the bottom hole pressure (BHP) error caused by omitting the flow between matrix and wellbore and that the effect of matrix porosity on BHP is related to adsorption gas content. When adsorbed gas accounts for large proportion of the total gas storage in shale formation, matrix porosity only has a very small effect on BHP. Otherwise, it has obvious influence. This paper can help us understand the complex pressure transient response due to existence of the adsorbed gas and help petroleum engineers to interpret the field data better.

Generation and application of adaptive PEBI grid for numerical well testing(NWT)

Several methods have been investigated on how to generate PEBI (Perpendicular Bisection) grid such as static property based method, flow based method and the combination of them. However, these methods are not suitable for NWT. In this paper, an adaptive gridding method is proposed for NWT based on the locations of the wells. First we divide the reservoir into several areas which each has one well in it. Then, PEBI grid points are placed in each area separately according to isobars which are derived from analytical solutions of the well in that area. At the end of this paper, proposed adaptive PEBI grid was compared with uniform coarse and fine grid. Numerical results in this paper showed that adaptive grid reduced two thirds of grid number and saved two thirds of computation time while kept almost same accuracy compared with fine grid.

Channel-width dependent pressure-driven flow characteristics of shale gas in nanopores

Understanding the flow characteristics of shale gas especially in nanopores is extremely important for the exploitation. Here, we perform molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate the hydrodynamics of methane in nanometre-sized slit pores. Using equilibrium molecular dynamics (EMD), the static properties including density distribution and self-diffusion coefficient of the confined methane are firstly analyzed. For a 6 nm slit pore, it is found that methane molecules in the adsorbed layer diffuse more slowly than those in the bulk. Using nonequilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD), the pressure-driven flow behavior of methane in nanopores is investigated. The results show that velocity profiles manifest an obvious dependence on the pore width and they translate from parabolic flow to plug flow when the width is decreased. In relatively large pores (6 – 10 nm), the parabolic flow can be described by the Navier-Stokes (NS) equation with appropriate boundary conditions because of its slip flow character...

A Novel Analytical Method to Calculate the Amounts of Free and Adsorbed Gas in Shale Gas Production

Shale gas has now become an important part of unconventional hydrocarbon resources all around the world. The typical properties of shale gas are that both adsorbed gas and free gas play important roles in gas production. Thus the contributions of free and adsorbed gas to the shale gas production have become a hot, significant, and challenging problem in petroleum engineering. This paper presents a new analytical method to calculate the amounts of free and adsorbed gas in the process of shale gas extraction. First, the expressions of the amounts of adsorbed gas, matrix free gas, and fracture free gas in shale versus the producing time are presented on the basis of Langmuir adsorption model and formation pressure distribution. Next, the mathematical model of multifractured horizontal wells in shale gas reservoirs is established and solved by use of Laplace transform and inversion to obtain the normalized formation pressure distribution. Finally, field case studies of two multifractured horizontal shale gas wells in China are carried out with the presented quantitative method. The amounts of adsorbed and free gas in production are calculated, and the adsorbed-to-total ratio is provided. The results show that the proposed method is reliable and efficient.

GPU-Based Computation of Formation Pressure for Multistage Hydraulically Fractured Horizontal Wells in Tight Oil and Gas Reservoirs

A mathematical model for multistage hydraulically fractured horizontal wells (MFHWs) in tight oil and gas reservoirs was derived by considering the variations in the permeability and porosity of tight oil and gas reservoirs that depend on formation pressure and mixed fluid properties and introducing the pseudo-pressure; analytical solutions were presented using the Newman superposition principle. The CPU-GPU asynchronous computing model was designed based on the CUDA platform, and the analytic solution was decomposed into infinite summation and integral forms for parallel computation. Implementation of this algorithm on an Intel i5 4590 CPU and NVIDIA GT 730 GPU demonstrates that computation speed increased by almost 80 times, which meets the requirement for real-time calculation of the formation pressure of MFHWs.