Simulation and visualization of the displacement between CO₂ and formation fluids at pore-scale levels and its application to the recovery of shale gas

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• 作者：Peng Hou ; Yang Ju ; Feng Gao ; Jianguo Wang…
• 关键词：CO2 ; formation fluid displacement ; Micro ; and nano ; pore scale ; Shale gas recovery ; Lattice Boltzmann methods ; Molecular dynamics ; FIB ; SEM
• 刊名：International Journal of Coal Science & Technology
• 出版年：2016
• 出版时间：December 2016
• 年：2016
• 卷：3
• 期：4
• 页码：351-369
• 全文大小：6048KB
• 刊物类别：Fossil Fuels (incl. Carbon Capture); Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences; Mineralogy;
• 刊物主题：Fossil Fuels (incl. Carbon Capture); Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences; Mineral Resources;
• 出版者：China Coal Society
• ISSN：2198-7823
• 卷排序：3

文摘

This article reports recent developments and advances in the simulation of the CO₂-formation fluid displacement behaviour at the pore scale of subsurface porous media. Roughly, there are three effective visualization approaches to detect and observe the CO₂-formation fluid displacement mechanism at the micro-scale, namely, magnetic resonance imaging, X-ray computed tomography and fabricated micromodels, but they are not capable of investigating the displacement process at the nano-scale. Though a lab-on-chip approach for the direct visualization of the fluid flow behaviour in nanoscale channels has been developed using an advanced epi-fluorescence microscopy method combined with a nanofluidic chip, it is still a qualitative analysis method. The lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) can simulate the CO₂ displacement processes in a two-dimensional or three-dimensional (3D) pore structure, but until now, the CO₂ displacement mechanisms had not been thoroughly investigated and the 3D pore structure of real rock had not been directly taken into account in the simulation of the CO₂ displacement process. The status of research on the applications of CO₂ displacement to enhance shale gas recovery is also analyzed in this paper. The coupling of molecular dynamics and LBM in tandem is proposed to simulate the CO₂-shale gas displacement process based on the 3D digital model of shale obtained from focused ion beams and scanning electron microscopy.