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The great amount of solid particles contained in a weighting agent is a major cause of the problems in both rheology properties and damage control mechanism of an oil-based drilling fluid (OBM). Therefore, a proper type of weighting agent can be a solution for the application of OBM. In this study, three weighting agents that have been commonly used with OBM, namely, standard barite, submicron barite and superfine manganese ore, are studied. Rheological properties of OBM and the degree of formation damage are assessed with regard to the three weighting agents. The agents are also studied in aspects of particle size, micromorphology, filtration loss and wall-building property, acid dissolution efficiency of mud cake, lubricity and sedimentation stability to analyse the effects of the agents on rheological properties and the degree of damage as well as to figure out the mechanism of rheology control and damage control. For the OBM, there is a mutual effect between rheological stability and the degree of damage. In consideration of the agents' properties, we can enhance the rheological stability of the OBM and control the degree of formation damage by properly selecting particle size, using acid-soluble materials and forming the mud cake with ultra-low permeability that can easily be cleared away.

As one of the key status of gas in shale reservoir, adsorption gas accounts for considerable percentage of total gas amount. Due to the complexity and nanostructure of shale gas reservoir, it is very challenging to represent adsorption gas through traditional methods. However, the integration of the fractal theory and molecular dynamics (MD) simulation may provide a new perspective of understanding such nanostructure and the micro-phenomenon happening in it. The key purpose of this paper is to investigate the adsorption phenomenon in shale kerogen. By using MD simulation and grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) algorithm, the adsorption of methane in 2, 5 and 10[Formula: see text]nm slit-like pores is simulated for different temperature and pressure status. According to the results, the average gas density in smaller pores is higher than that in bigger pores, and multilayer adsorption presents on some areas of pore surfaces. Then, the simulation results are analyzed using the multilayer fractal adsorption model. The analysis indicates that the number of adsorption layer increases with pressure increase: four-layer adsorption presents in 10[Formula: see text]nm pores while three-layer adsorption shows up in 2[Formula: see text]nm and 5[Formula: see text]nm pores due to pore volume limit. Fractal dimension of pore wall surface generated in this study is in the range of 2.31–2.63. Moreover, high temperature could decrease the adsorption behavior in reservoir condition.

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