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Unconventional reservoir resources are important to supplement energy consumption and maintain the balance of supply and demand in the oil and gas market. However, due to the complex geological conditions, it is a significant challenge to develop unconventional reservoirs efficiently and economically. At present, unconventional reservoirs are extensively studied, covering a wide range of areas, with special attention to the multiscale characterization of pore structures and fracture networks, description of complex fluid transport mechanisms, mathematical modeling of flow properties, and coupled analysis with multiphysics fields. This work briefly describes the multiscale and multiphysics influences on fluids in unconventional reservoirs, and the modeling and simulation work conducted to analyze them, with the aim to provide some theoretical basis for enhanced recovery from these geo-energy resources. The present article also aims to enhance the community's knowledge of other potential utilizations associated with some unconventional reservoirs, specially related to environmentally-driven projects, including permanent greenhouse gas storage and cyclic underground energy storage.


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Multiscale and multiphysics influences on fluids in unconventional reservoirs: Modeling and simulation

Show Author's information Jianchao Cai1 ( )David A. Wood2 Hadi Hajibeygi3Stefan Iglauer4
State Key Laboratory of Petroleum Resources and Prospecting, China University of Petroleum, Beijing 102249, P. R. China
DWA Energy Limited, Lincoln, LN5 9JP, UK
Faculty of Civil Engineering and Geosciences, Delft University of Technology, P. O. Box 5048, 2600 GA Delft, Netherlands
School of Engineering, Edith Cowan University, 270 Joondalup Drive, 6027 Joondalup, Australia

Abstract

Unconventional reservoir resources are important to supplement energy consumption and maintain the balance of supply and demand in the oil and gas market. However, due to the complex geological conditions, it is a significant challenge to develop unconventional reservoirs efficiently and economically. At present, unconventional reservoirs are extensively studied, covering a wide range of areas, with special attention to the multiscale characterization of pore structures and fracture networks, description of complex fluid transport mechanisms, mathematical modeling of flow properties, and coupled analysis with multiphysics fields. This work briefly describes the multiscale and multiphysics influences on fluids in unconventional reservoirs, and the modeling and simulation work conducted to analyze them, with the aim to provide some theoretical basis for enhanced recovery from these geo-energy resources. The present article also aims to enhance the community's knowledge of other potential utilizations associated with some unconventional reservoirs, specially related to environmentally-driven projects, including permanent greenhouse gas storage and cyclic underground energy storage.

Keywords: multiphysics, pore structure, Unconventional reservoirs, multiscale

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Received: 26 February 2022
Revised: 28 February 2022
Accepted: 01 March 2022
Published: 03 March 2022
Issue date: April 2022

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© The Author(s) 2022.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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