Shale gas: A solution for energy crisis and lower CO2 emission in Pakistan

Energy supply is an essential element for development in any country. However, the huge energy demand in future, which depends mainly on fossil fuels, may create an environmental crisis. In this paper, an attempt was made to highlight the shale gas prospect of Pakistan as a solution for its future energy demands. It seems that Pakistan is currently consuming a huge amount of domestic natural gas and crude oil, which may soon result in climate change. As such, it is crucial to consider shale gas reserves as an ultimate solution for energy and achieving a low carbon economy.     

A novel approach to determine the Biot’s coefficient using X-ray computed tomography

Linear poroelastic effective stress law is often used to relate in situ total stresses to pore fluid pressure in underground formations. The indirect estimations of effective stress coefficient (Biot coefficient) based on porosity relationships are often not accurate, and therefore the Biot coefficient measurements on retrieved samples using hydro-mechanical laboratory testing is considered. In this study, we propose a new indirect technique to infer the Biot coefficient from micro X-ray computed tomography (XRCT) images of porous granular samples whenever images are available using a simple principle of continuum mechanics. The performance of the method was assessed through a series of experiments conducted on sandstone and unconsolidated sand. The proposed method enables calculating the anisotropy of the Biot coefficient of the sample in three dimensions. We also conducted the conventional hydro-mechanical experiment to validate the obtained Biot coefficient results from the XRCT technique. The proposed technique shows promising results on estimation of the Biot coefficient. The analysis of the images confirms that the method performs well when the connectivity between grains (skeleton structure) can be extracted from XRCT images with enough resolution. The method is also able to (a) estimate the Biot coefficient of both consolidated and unconsolidated sand structure and (b) map the anisotropy of Biot coefficient in three dimensions.