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Fractal and Multifractal Characteristics of Pore Throats in the Bakken Shale

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Abstract

To evaluate pore structures of the Bakken Shale, which is one of the most important factors that affect petrophysical properties, high-pressure mercury intrusion was employed in this study. Pore structures such as pore-throat size, pore-throat ratio, and fractal attributes are investigated in this major shale play. Pore-throat size from 3.6 to 200 um is widely distributed in these shale samples. Accordingly, pore-throat size distributions demonstrate the multimodal behavior within the samples. The whole pore-throat network can be divided into four clusters: one set of large pores, two transitional/intermediate pore groups, and one set of smaller pores. The fractal analysis revealed that fractal dimensions decrease as the pore-throat size decreases. The multifractal analysis demonstrated that as the maturity of the shale samples increases, pore-throat size distributions would become more uniform and pore structures tend to become more homogeneous. The results are compared to our previous results obtained from nitrogen gas adsorption for further verifications of fractal behavior. Finally, although fractal analysis of mercury intrusion and nitrogen gas adsorption were comparable, the results of multifractal analysis from these two methods were not identical.

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Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the support from China Scholarship Council (No. 201406450029). We would like to also show our appreciation to ND Core Library, Jeff Bader the director and state geologist as well as Kent Holland library technician for providing us with the samples. We thank Dr. Liu from Northeast Petroleum University for running the experiments. We also appreciate the reviewers to give their comments to improve the quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Petroleum Engineering, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, 58202, USA

    Kouqi Liu, Mehdi Ostadhassan & Lingyun Kong

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  1. Kouqi Liu
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  2. Mehdi Ostadhassan
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  3. Lingyun Kong
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Correspondence to Kouqi Liu or Mehdi Ostadhassan.

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Liu, K., Ostadhassan, M. & Kong, L. Fractal and Multifractal Characteristics of Pore Throats in the Bakken Shale. Transp Porous Med 126, 579–598 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-018-1130-2

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