Characterization of Methane Excess and Absolute Adsorption in Various Clay Nanopores from Molecular Simulation

Abstract

In this work, we use grand canonical Monte Carlo (GCMC) simulation to study methane adsorption in various clay nanopores and analyze different approaches to characterize the absolute adsorption. As an important constituent of shale, clay minerals can have significant amount of nanopores, which greatly contribute to the gas-in-place in shale. In previous works, absolute adsorption is often calculated from the excess adsorption and bulk liquid phase density of absorbate. We find that methane adsorbed phase density keeps increasing with pressure up to 80 MPa. Even with updated adsorbed phase density from GCMC, there is a significant error in absolute adsorption calculation. Thus, we propose to use the excess adsorption and adsorbed phase volume to calculate absolute adsorption and reduce the discrepancy to less than 3% at high pressure conditions. We also find that the supercritical Dubinin-Radushkevich (SDR) fitting method which is commonly used in experiments to convert the excess adsorption to absolute adsorption may not have a solid physical foundation for methane adsorption. The methane excess and absolute adsorptions per specific surface area are similar for different clay minerals in line with previous experimental data. In mesopores, the excess and absolute adsorptions per specific surface area become insensitive to pore size. Our work should provide important fundamental understandings and insights into accurate estimation of gas-in-place in shale reservoirs.