Pore Structure of Coals by Mercury Intrusion, N₂ Adsorption and NMR: A Comparative Study

Coalbed methane (CBM) mainly adsorb in massive pores of coal. The accurate characterization of pores benefits CBM resource evaluation, exploration and exploitation. In this paper, mercury intrusion porosimetry (MIP) and low temperature nitrogen adsorption (N2GA) combined with low field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiments were conducted to analyze the advantages and differences among different experimental techniques in pore characterization. The results show that the total porosity has a tendency to decrease first and then rise with the increase of coal rank, which is mainly caused by the compaction in early stage and the thermogenic gas produced in middle and late stages of coalification. The comparison between different techniques shows that NMR is superior to the conventional methods in terms of porosity and pore size distribution, which should be favorable for pore characterization. The N2GA pore size measurement, based on BJH model, is only accurate within 10‒100 nm in diameter. There is a peak misalignment between the NMR and MIP results in the pore size comparison. The reason for this phenomenon is that there is a centrifugal error in NMR experiment, which could cause a differential damage to the coal sample, resulting in partial loss of the nuclear magnetic signal