Pore-Size Distributions for Organic-Shale-Reservoir Rocks From Nuclear-Magnetic-Resonance Spectra Combined With Adsorption Measurements

Summary The behavior of fluids in nanometer-scale pores can have a strong functional dependence on the pore size. In mature organic-shale reservoirs, the nuclear-magnetic-resonance (NMR) signal from methane decays by surface relaxation. The methane NMR spectrum provides an uncalibrated pore-size distribution for the pores that store methane. The distribution can be calibrated by calculating a pore-wall-surface area from a methane-Langmuir-adsorption isotherm. When this method was applied to samples from a reservoir in the dry-gas window, the pores containing methane had pore sizes that ranged from 1 to approximately 100 nm. Approximately 20–40% of the pore volume was in pores smaller than 10 nm, where deviation from bulk-fluid behavior can be significant. The samples came from two wells. The surface relaxivity for the sample from Well 2 was somewhat different from the relaxivity for the two samples from Well 1. Samples that adsorbed more methane had smaller pore sizes. This methodology to obtain pore-size distributions should be extendable to more-general organic-shale reservoirs.