Natural gas from organic rich shales has become an important part of the supply of natural gas in the United States. Modern drilling and stimulation techniques have increased the potential and profitability of shale gas reserves that earlier were regarded as unprofitable resources of natural gas. The most prominent property of shale gas reservoirs is the low permeability. This is also the reaso...

Multiple-factor analysis and optimization play a critical role in the the ability to maximizethe stimulated reservoir volume (SRV) and the success of economic shale gas production. In this paper, taking the typical continental naturally fractured silty laminae shale in China as anexample, response surface methodology (RSM) was employed to optimize multiple hydraulic fracturing parameters to max...

Few attempts have been made to model shale gas reservoirs on a compositional basis. Multiple distinct micro-scale physical phenomena influence the transport and storage of reservoir fluids in shale, including differential desorption, preferential Knudsen diffusion, and capillary critical effects. Concerted, these phenomena cause a measureable compositional change in the produced gas over time. ...

Estimation of reserves in tight gas and shale gas reservoirs is problematic due to the low to ultra-low permeability characteristics of these reservoir systems. The sole application of conventional decline curve analysis methodologies often yields erroneous reserve estimates. Therefore, the use of theoretically-based production analysis techniques has become a must to analyze well performance a...

Extensive work has been done in the recent years involving use of conventional and passive seismic data for fracture characterization. This is particularly the case with unconventional reservoirs such as shale gas, shale oil and geothermal fields. The purpose of our study is to combine the benefits of conventional seismic data that provides relatively higher resolution reservoir characteristics...

Worldwide interest in shale plays has rapidly increased in recently years, thanks to the combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. Shale formations act as both the source and the reservoir for the natural gas and usually exhibit anisotropic properties at larger scale. Geological and petropysical studies found that the right combination of thickness, TOC (total organic carbon)...

Various analytical, semi-analytical, and empirical models have been proposed to characterize rate and pressure behavior as a function of time in tight gas and shale gas systems featuring horizontal wells with multiple hydraulic fractures. Despite a few analytical models, as well as a small number of published numerical studies, there is currently little consensus regarding the large-scale flow ...

The petroleum industry’s use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies has changed organic-rich mudstones, like the Devonian Marcellus Formation, from conventional hydrocarbon sources and seals to unconventional ‘shale gas’ reservoirs. Organic-richness and formation brittleness are two principal components of reservoir quality assessment, as the former is indicative of the am...

The current research of nonlinear seepage theory of shale-gas reservoir is still in its infancy. According to the characteristics of shale gas in adsorption-desorption, diffusion, slippage and seepage during accumulation, migration and production, a mathematical model of unstable seepage in dual-porosity sealed shale-gas reservoir was developed while considering Knudsen diffusion, slip-flow eff...

The state of the art of modeling fluid flow in shale reservoirs is dominated by dual porosity models which divide the reservoirs into matrix blocks that significantly contribute to fluid storage and fracture networks which principally control flow capacity. However, recent extensive microscopic studies reveal that there exist massive microand nanopore systems in shale matrices. Because of this,...