CHARACTERIZATION OF PORE STRUCTURES ON THE LOWER SILURIAN MARINE SHALE GAS PLAY

Gas shales are different from conventional reservoir as the strata are both source rock and reservoir rock for gas, and no structural or stratigraphic traps are needed to retain the gas. The recent advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing stimulations have made vast shale gas resource commercially viable. However, due to the complex nature of gas storage, the quantification of shale gas reservoirs has been proven extremely challenging. Shale formation is usually extremely tight and the majority of the pores are nano-pores in which the diameters of the pores are in the range of several nanometers to tenth of nanometers. In this research, we propose to perform the numerical sensitivity study of nanopore structures on fluid flow. The proposed research will involve: Generation of 3-dimensional digital core of nano-pore structures based on the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) images of real core samples that are collected from the Longmaxi Formation - Lower Silurian Marine Shale Gas Play in Southern China. The results indicate that digital core is an efficient way to characterize the micropores structure of the shale formation parameters.Petroleum Engineering, Department o