Characterization of oil shale pore system after heat treatment

Oil shale is an unconventional oil and gas resource normally formed by an inorganic mineral skeleton and organic matter, such as kerogen and asphaltene, matrix. And in-situ underground heating is primary method to develop this promising unconventional resource. Our previous study has shown that different heating modes will result in significant differences in pore structure of oil shale.

In this work, we characterized the pore system of oil shale with two heat treatment future by well know fractal theory and digital rock physics. The oil shale samples before and after conduction, convection heating were scanned using high resolution micro-CT experimental system, and the spatial resolution equals to 4 microns. The scanned micro-CT images were then segmented for pore system characterization with the well know fractal theory that estimated from box account method and permeability estimation using the Lattice Boltzmann method.