Accurately determining the gas sorption capacity of a specific shale reservoir is critical
for further assessment of shale gas reserves. A series of high-pressure
methane adsorption measurements were conducted at 60 °C with
a pressure of up to 30 MPa for Wufeng-Longmaxi shales from the southern
Sichuan Basin, which is considered as the most promising shale-gas
target in China, to evaluate the fitting quality of different excess
adsorption models and to determine the effect of organic matter content,
maturity, mineralogy, and pore structure on the gas adsorption capacity.
Both the Langmuir- and supercritical Dubinin–Radushkevich (SDR)-based
adsorption models are closely fitted with the measured excess adsorption
amount. However, the freely fitted SDR model is considered to be the
most reasonable model, in which the adsorbed-phase density is always
lower than the liquid methane density at the boiling point (0.424
g/cm3) and the average relative error (ARE) is relatively
small. Adsorbed-phase density is a key parameter for calculating absolute
adsorption isotherms. For a specific shale, a lower constant adsorbed-phase
density applied in the adsorption model would result in higher absolute
adsorption capacity. For the Langmuir-based model, the actual absolute
adsorption capacity would be underestimated when adsorption experiments
were only conducted at the low-pressure range (0–15 MPa). The
methane adsorption capacities show a great positive correlation with
the total organic carbon (TOC) content. The TOC-normalized adsorption
capacities have a negative relationship with maturity at an overmature
stage. The clay content shows a positive correlation with the TOC-normalized
adsorption capacities, indicating that clays also make some contribution
to methane sorption on these organic-rich shales. Furthermore, methane
adsorption in overmature shales is mainly controlled by the structure
of the pore <20 nm in size, revealing that the adsorbed methane
is occupied not only in micropores but also in fine mesopores.
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