A University of Oklahoma interdisciplinary research team will field test a newly developed ‘quad porosity model’ for shale gas reservoirs in the next few months. The three-year, $1.5 million project was funded by the Research for Partnership to Secure Energy for America and a consortium of nine oil and gas producing companies.
Just a year into the project, the OU research team has made a number of discoveries, which has led to a greater understanding of gas and liquids transport in shale gas reservoirs and the development of the quad porosity model.
While current numerical reservoir simulators are sophisticated in terms of their gridding algorithms and computational efficiency, they are restricted to modeling viscous flow. The OU research team had to rethink the physics of fluid flow and storage, which are very different in these nanoporous inorganic and organic pores. Additional complexity arises due to adsorption of gas in the organics in a high-density layer adjacent to the pore walls.
One of the key developments of the research team over the last year is predicting the phase behavior of gas condensates in nanopores.
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