Quantitative determination of abandonment pressure for CO2 storage in depleted shale gas reservoirs by free-simulator approach

Abstract

Abandonment pressure of shale gas reservoirs has been in the center of attention to evaluate the CO2 storage in such reservoirs. However, the evaluation of abandonment pressure in shale gas reservoirs is not clearly defined. To quantitatively determine the abandonment pressure for CO2 storage in depleted shale gas reservoirs, we introduced two effective and reasonable semi-analytical models, named pressure transient analysis (PTA) and rate transient analysis (RTA), based on a free-simulator approach. Firstly, by line source function, CO2 seepage models for an injection well with constant injection rate or constant injection pressure were simultaneously proposed in consideration of gas adsorption, diffusion flow, stress sensitivity and non-Darcy flow effects. Then, we solved seepage models using Laplace transformation, perturbation method, superposition principle and numerical discretization method, thus obtained transient-pressure and transient-rate solutions of the injection well. Further, we compared the proposed mathematical models with existing models. Furthermore, we systematically examined the sensitivity of the parameters, thereby constraining the intrinsic uncertainty to evaluate the abandonment pressure. Finally, we applied the proposed method to study a real case from Sichuan Basin in China, thus demonstrating the promising prosperity of this new quantitative determination of abandonment pressure for CO2 storage in depleted shale gas reservoirs. Our results showed that the maximum difference between our proposed method and numerical method was lower than 5%, suggesting a good agreement between the two methods. Moreover, our results also showed that free-simulator approach gave much faster calculation speed compared to numerical method. As a result, we provided a framework for the quantitative determination of abandonment pressure, by coupling pressure transient analysis (PTA) and rate transient analysis (RTA) during CO2 injection at constant injection pressure and injection rate. Moreover, our results also showed that the abandonment pressure has power law relationship with the injection pressure using PTA method, and the abandonment pressure has logarithm relationship with CO2 injection volume using RTA method.