“…One of the key concerns of the exploitation of shale resources is the evaluation of the production performance after fracturing (Jarvie et al, 2007;Wang and Gale, 2009;Jin et al, 2014;Tang et al, 2019;Wei et al, 2020). Previous studies have observed that the fracturing fluids interact significantly with minerals and change their properties such as wettability, morphology, composition, water-bearing properties, and cation exchange capacity (CEC) (Chen et al, 2016;Chen et al, 2018a;Chen et al, 2018b;Lu et al, 2018;Sari et al, 2019;Zeng et al, 2019), leading to problems such as low flowback recovery of fracturing fluids, environment hazard, hydration, expansion, and rheology of clay minerals (O'Brien and Chenevert, 1973;Makhanov et al, 2014;Al-Ameri et al, 2018;Sui et al, 2018;Aadnøy and Looyeh, 2019;Zeng et al, 2019) and will impact seriously on the production progress. Therefore, to better understand the mechanisms of these problems and their potential effect on production performance, a detailed analysis of the characteristics of shale pores and surface structures and their potential interactions with the fracturing fluids and the confined fluids in shale formations is of great significance.…”