Enhanced natural gas recovery from low-permeable reservoirs

Abstract

This paper presents the analysis of challenges concerning development of natural gas fields with low-permeable reservoirs and experimental results of conducted laboratory researches, which provide the opportunity to establish regularities of adsorption-desorption processes in tight sands and develop technologies that enable increasing gas recovery factor from low-permeable reservoirs. For this purpose, a series of laboratory experiments were carried out on the sand packed models of layers with different permeability (from 9.7 to 93 mD) using methane, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The pressure in the experiments varied from 1 to 10 MPa, temperature – 22–60 degrees of Celsius. These studies revealed the influence of pressure, temperature, reservoir permeability and non-hydrocarbon gases injection rate on the course of adsorption-desorption processes and their impact on the gas recovery factor. The obtained results of conducted experiments show high efficiency of non-hydrocarbon gases injection to enhance gas recovery and feasibility of their application in the natural gas field with low-permeable reservoirs.