Fluid phase behavior of tight and shale reservoirs: Monte Carlo simulations

Tight and shale reservoirs are forming important components of the global hydrocarbon landscape, which impede the free thermal movement of fluid molecules, with numerous nanoscale pores. The confined hydrocarbons in the nanopores cannot be industrially produced from conventional exploration and development methods, with deviated fluid phase behavior under nano-confinement effects. Most commonly important fluid phase behavior in nanopores has been simulated and compared with the bulk cases previously, including phase coexistence, critical properties, and density distribution of confined fluids. This paper focuses on the deviated fluid phase behavior under nano-confinement effects by Monte Carlo modeling. The Monte Carlo simulation is still limited to modeling the macroscopic pore-related behavior like capillarity and complex fluid and solid materials. Moreover, the Monte Carlo simulation is usually scale-restricted and the pore-size range where the nano-confinement effect fails to work needs to be quantitatively determined. Overall, for the tight and shale fluid phase behavior, a functional Monte Carlo model, coupled with the long-range correction and configuration bias techniques, is suggested to include both the multi-component fluids and skeleton.