Investigations of Water Transport in Shale Reservoir with Dual-Wettability by Using Monte Carlo Method

Abstract

How liquids transport in the shale system has been the focus because of fracturing fluid loss. In this study, a single-nanopore model is established for liquid transport in shale while considering the slip effect and effective viscosity of confined fluids. Then, the fractal Monte Carlo (FMC) model is proposed to upscale the single-pore model into shale porous media. The effects of different transport mechanisms, shale wettability, and pore characteristic parameters on confined liquid flow in shale rock are investigated. Results show that FMC permeabilities are 2–3 orders of magnitude larger than intrinsic and slip-corrected permeabilities in organic matter. However, the slip effect and effective viscosity have little influence on water flow in inorganic matter. With the contact angle of organic pore (θ om ) increasing and contact angle of inorganic pore (θ in ) decreasing, the effective permeability of the whole shale matrix grows in number. The enhancement factor in the situation of θ om = 170° and θ in = 20° is 4 orders of magnitude larger than the case of θ om = 130° and θ in = 40°, although the close effective macroscopic contact angle (θ eff = 80°) occurs in these two cases, which indicates that shale microscopic wettability has a significant impact on the confined liquid transport. Moreover, with the increase of porosity and maximum pore diameters, shale permeability increases rapidly, but the enhancement factor has the opposite trend. Compared with the tiny impact of the variance of minimum inorganic pore diameters, minimum organic pore diameters have more significant impacts on liquid flow in shale systems, and the enhancement factor also rapidly increases up to 30 times for the case of 0.5 nm because of the strong slip effect.