An Extensive Study on Desorption Models Generated Based on Langmuir and Knudsen Diffusion

Abstract

Although gas desorption is a known phenomenon, modeling fluid flow in tight gas reservoirs often ignores the governing desorption effect, assuming that viscous transport is the predominant controller, resulting in an erroneous prediction of mass transport and fluid flow calculations. Thus, developing a new model accommodating all the major contributing forces in such a medium is essential. This work introduces a new comprehensive flow model suitable for tight unconventional reservoirs, including viscous, inertia, diffusion, and sorption forces, to account for fluid transport. Based on Langmuir law and Knudsen diffusion effect, three models were generated and compared with different known models using synthetic data. The model was solved and analyzed for different scenario cases, and parametric studies were conducted to evaluate the desorption effect on different reservoir types using MATLAB. Results show that the contribution of the sorption mechanism to the flow increases with the reducing permeability of the medium and lower viscosity of the flowing fluid and an additional pressure drop up to 10 psi was quantified.

Keywords

• unconventional reservoirs
• desorption
• modeling
• fluid flow