Did you know that even with our super-productive fracking methods, we still only pull out an estimated 5% of oil found in shale, and an estimated 20% of natural gas? That’s abysmal! Can’t we do better? Indeed, perhaps we can. Shale oil and gas is locked up in teeny tiny pores in shale rock–very small “pockets” if you want to think of it that way. The reason we don’t currently do a better job of accessing more of those small pockets is lack of understanding in how fluids flow through these small pores, which measure nanometers across. It takes one billion nanometers to make up one meter, or roughly three feet. Exciting new research shared this week in the journal Physics of Fluids sheds new light on the physics of fluids flowing through shale rock. The research paper, “Many-body dissipative particle dynamics modeling of fluid flow in fine-grained nanoporous shales” (full copy below). This new research means we are on the path to learning how to extract even more oil and gas from the same shale rock. Now that’s something to celebrate!…
Did you know that even with our super-productive fracking methods, we still only pull out an estimated 5% of oil found in shale, and an estimated 20% of natural gas? That’s abysmal! Can’t we do better? Indeed, perhaps we can. Shale oil and gas is locked up in teeny tiny pores in shale rock–very small “pockets” if you want to think of it that way. The reason we don’t currently do a better job of accessing more of those small pockets is lack of understanding in how fluids flow through these small pores, which measure nanometers across. It takes one billion nanometers to make up one meter, or roughly three feet. Exciting new research shared this week in the journal Physics of Fluids sheds new light on the physics of fluids flowing through shale rock. The research paper, “Many-body dissipative particle dynamics modeling of fluid flow in fine-grained nanoporous shales” (full copy below). This new research means we are on the path to learning how to extract even more oil and gas from the same shale rock. Now that’s something to celebrate!…