Abstract
Understanding of fundamental processes and prediction of optimal parameters during the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing process results in economically effective improvement of oil and natural gas extraction. Although modern analytical and computational models can capture fracture growth, there is a lack of experimental data on spontaneous imbibition and wettability in oil and gas reservoirs for the validation of further model development. In this work, we used neutron imaging to measure the spontaneous imbibition of water into fractures of Eagle Ford shale with known geometries and fracture orientations. An analytical solution for a set of nonlinear second-order differential equations was applied to the measured imbibition data to determine effective contact angles. The analytical solution fit the measured imbibition data reasonably well and determined effective contact angles that were slightly higher than static contact angles due to effects of in-situ changes in velocity, surface roughness, and heterogeneity of mineral surfaces on the fracture surface. Additionally, small fracture widths may have retarded imbibition and affected model fits, which suggests that average fracture widths are not satisfactory for modeling imbibition in natural systems.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 874-887 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Journal of Earth Science |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Oct 1 2017 |
Funding
This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish This work was supported as part of the Center for Nanos-cale Controls on Geologic CO₂ (NCGC), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (No. DE-AC02-05CH11231). Victoria H. DiStefano acknowledges a graduate fellowship through the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the University of Tennessee. Vitaliy Starchenko was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences, Geosciences, and Biosciences Division. Edmund Perfect’s research was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory (No. W911NF-16-1-0043). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. Government. The U.S. government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation herein. We acknowledge the support of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S. Department of Commerce, in providing the neutron research facilities used in this work. A portion of this research used resources at the High Flux Isotope Reactor, a DOE Office of Science User Facility operated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. We would also like to thank Andrew Kolbus, Sa-lesforce, Robert Brese, UTK & ORNL, and Xiaojuan Zhu, Office of Information Technology at UTK, for assistance with Python, the Keyence VR-3100, and MATLAB, respectively. The final publication is available at Springer via https://doi.org/10.1007/s12583-017-0801-1.
Keywords
- Eagle Ford shale
- effective contact angle
- neutron imaging
- rock fractures
- spontaneous imbibition
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