Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Geology

First Advisor

K. Ling

Abstract

Petroleum exploration and production from shale formations have gained great attention throughout the world in the last decade. Producing the hydrocarbons from shale is challenging because of the low porosity and permeability. It is imperative to investigate permeability of the shale formations in order to better understand the performance of wells that are producing hydrocarbons from shale. Permeability is also one of key parameters in modeling fluids flow in matrix in reservoir simulation. Due to the low or very low permeability, the measurement of permeability is time consuming and expensive. These factors often limited the ability to perform permeability measurement on large numbers of samples. Thus, there is a great demand for a method that can significantly reduce the time of the measurement, which leads to lower cost in core analysis.

In this study a downstream pressure build-up method, which is more operational, as in this method the ratio of volume of the upstream reservoir, V1, to volume of the downstream reservoir, V2, approaches infinite.

In addition, we developed another new method to determine the permeability of low to very low permeability rock based on Darcy’s law and the radius-of-investigation concept, which has been used in the well test design and analysis. Our method evaluates the permeability under unsteady-state flow, which requires a shorter time to determine flow capacity of low permeability rock. The new approach is different from the existing methods, such as GRI, oscillating pulse, and pulse decay methods. The significance of this investigation is that it overcomes the limitations in existing methods thus becomes an important supplement to the existing methods.

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