Advances in Understanding Wettability of Tight and Shale Gas Formations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper aims at understanding the factors controlling the wettability of unconventional rocks. In the first part, we report the results of comparative imbibition experiments on several binary core plugs from the Montney tight gas formation, which is an enormous tight gas fairway in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. Both contact angle and imbibition data indicate that the formation is strongly oil-wet. However, the ratio between oil and water imbibition rate of these samples is higher than what capillary-driven imbibition models predict. This discrepancy can be explained by the strong adsorption of oil on the surface of a well-connected organic pore network that is partly coated by pyrobitumen. We also define a wettability index by using the equilibrium imbibed volume of oil and water in binary plugs. Oil wettability index is in general positively correlated to the total organic carbon (TOC), measured by the Rock-Eval technique. In the second part, we report similar imbibition experiments on several binary core samples collected from the cores drilled in the shale members of the Horn River Basin. In contrast to the Montney (MT) samples, the Horn River (HR) samples imbibe significantly more water than oil. This observation contradicts the contact angle results which suggest that the HR samples are strongly oil-wet. Clay hydration, imbibition-induced microfractures, depositional lamination, and osmotic potential are collectively responsible for the excess water uptake. We also measure and compare spontaneous imbibition of oil and water into the crushed packs of the similar HR samples. Interestingly, in contrast to the intact samples, the crushed samples consistently imbibe more oil than water. The comparative study suggests that the connected pore network of the intact HR samples is water-wet while the majority of rock including poorly connected pores is oil-wet. Overall, the results suggest that the well-connected pore network of the MT samples is dominantly hydrophobic and is very likely to be coated by pyrobitumen. This is the main reason why these samples imbibe more oil than water. On the other hand, the well-connected pore network of the HR samples is strongly hydrophilic primarily due to the presence of clay minerals and precipitated salt crystals coating the rock grains.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".