Abstract
Abstract Gas relative permeability, krg, is a key parameter to determine
gas production in unconventional reservoirs. Several theoretical
approaches were proposed to study gas relative permeability in tight and
ultra-tight porous rocks. Some models are based on a “bundle of
capillary tubes” concept. Some others were developed based upon a
combination of universal scaling laws from percolation theory and the
effective-medium approximation (EMA). Although applications from the EMA
have been successfully used to estimate single-phase permeability in
permeable media (Ghanbarian et al., 2017; Ghanbarian and Javadpour,
2017), non-universal scaling from the EMA has never been invoked to
model gas relative permeability in tight and/or ultra-tight porous
rocks. In this study, it was assumed that pore-throat sizes follow the
log-normal distribution. It was further assumed that gas transport in
shales is mainly controlled by molecular and hydraulic flow, two
mechanisms contributing in parallel. Using the EMA, effective
pore-throat radii, effective conductances, and gas relative
permeabilities were determined at various gas saturations. Comparison
with three-dimensional pore-network simulations showed that the proposed
krg model estimated gas relative permeability accurately. We also
compared our model with experimental data reported in Yassin et al.
(2016) including three Montney tight gas siltstone samples from the
Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. Results showed that our model
estimated krg reasonably well, although it slightly overestimated krg.
This might be because the fitted log-normal probability density function
underestimated the probability of small pore-throat sizes. References
Ghanbarian, B., & Javadpour, F. (2017). Upscaling pore
pressure‐dependent gas permeability in shales. Journal of Geophysical
Research: Solid Earth, 122(4), 2541-2552. Ghanbarian, B., Torres-Verdin,
C., Lake, L. W., & Marder, M. P. (2017). Upscaling gas permeability in
tight-gas sandstones. AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts. New Orleans LA.
Yassin, M. R., Dehghanpour, H., Wood, J., & Lan, Q. (2016). A theory
for relative permeability of unconventional rocks with dual-wettability
pore network. SPE Journal, 21(06), 1970-1980.