Effect of Nanoporous Materials on Saturation Pressure in Shale Reservoirs

There has been a rapid growth in research for thermodynamic properties of shale reservoirs. The common pore size of shale reservoirs is approximately 1-20 nm and the interactions between the pore wall and the fluid within the pore may have a significant effect on the localized fluid properties and phase behavior in these confined spaces. The focus of this work is the effect of porous materials on the saturation pressure of a hydrocarbon mixture of methane and decane. Synthesized SBA-15 was utilized as the nanoporous material, which can represent the porous system in shale reservoirs.

The phase diagram of the binary mixture of methane and decane has been modeled with the Windprop module from the CMG reservoir simulator. The experimentally measured saturation pressure without nanoporous material matches well with the simulated results. However, the measured saturation pressure changes when the mixture is within the nanoporous material. This implies that the saturation pressure of hydrocarbon mixtures in shale reservoirs are different than those found in conventional reservoirs.