During the past decade, shale gas developments have changed the energy structure in the US natural gas industry, and the exploration activities for shale gas are also increasing worldwide. According to the papers published in recent years, shale gas resources are quite abundant in China. With the successful experience obtained from North America, many state-of-the-art technologies are brought in and refined for field application. State-owned enterprise, private enterprises and foreign enterprises have all actively participated in the exploitation of shale gas. Compared with US, China faces many more challenges, both geological and above-ground, in the development of shale gas resources.

This paper begins with the introduction of shale gas reserve distribution in China and the identified shale gas formation in Sichuan Basin. The following paper reviews the methodology employed in the geophysical prospecting, drilling and completion, and hydraulic fracturing process. Since China is in the early stage of shale gas development, there is a great technical gap between China and North America. Based on literature review, the major challenges faced in the exploration and production process are identified. What presented in this paper should be of particular interest to the personnels involved in shale gas production in China and countries that are about to set foot in shale gas business. It will also be of interest to researchers who are dedicated to developing these technologies to unlock unconventional gas resources in China.

Hydraulic fracturing is widely accepted and applied to improve the gas recovery in unconventional reservoirs. Unconventional reservoirs to be addressed here are with very low permeability, complicated geological settings and in-situ stress field etc. All of these make the hydraulic fracturing process a challenging task. In order to effectively and economically recover gas from such reservoirs, the initiation and propagation of hydraulic fracturing in the heterogeneous fractured/porous media under such complicated conditions should be mastered. In this paper, some issues related to hydraulic fracturing have been reviewed, including the experimental study, field study and numerical simulation. Finally the existing problems that need to be solved on the subject of hydraulic fracturing have been proposed.

This paper studies the lithofacies, sedimentary facies, depositional models and reservoir architecture of the rudist-bearing Sar-3 zone of Cretaceous Sarvak in the Southwest of Iran by utilizing coring, thin section, XRD data of five coring wells and 3D seismic data. Research results include the following: According to lithofacies features and their association, the rudist-mound and tidal flat are the main microfacies in the Sar-3 depositional time. By investigating the regional tectonic setting and seismic interpretation, a depositional model was built for the Sar-3 zone, which highlights four key points: 1) The distribution of the rudist-buildup is controlled by the paleo-high. 2) The build-up outside of the wide colonize stage but reached the wave-base level in a short time by regression and formation uplift, and was destroyed by the high energy current, then forming the moundy allochthonous deposition after being dispersed and redeposited. 3) The tidal flat develops widely in the upper Sar-3, and the deposition thickness depends on the paleo-structure. The tidal channel develops in the valley and fringe of the Paleo-structure. 4) The exposure within the leaching effect by the meteoric water of the top of Sar-3 is the main controlling factor of the reservoir vertical architecture. The Sar-3 zone featured as the dualistic architecture consists of two regions: the lower is the rudist reef limestone reservoir and the upper is the tidal condense limestone interlayer. The thickness of each is controlled by the paleo-structure. The Paleo-high zone is the preferential development zone. Based on reservoir characteristics of the different zones, a targeted development strategy has been proposed. Keeping the trajectory in the middle of the oil-layer in the paleo-high, and in the paleo-low, make the trajectory crossing the oil-zone and then keep it in the lower.

This paper presents a new method of injection-production allocation estimation for water-flooding mature oilfields. The suggested approach is based on logistic growth rate functions and several type-curve matching methods. Using the relationship between these equations, oil production and water injection rate as well as injection-production ratio can be easily forecasted. The calculation procedure developed and outlined in this paper requires very few production data and is easily implemented. Furthermore, an oilfield case has been analyzed. The synthetic and field cases validate the calculation procedure, so it can be accurately used in forecasting production data, and it is important to optimize the whole injection-production system.

One of the mechanisms of alkaline flooding relies on alkaline reaction with organic acids (saponifiable components) in the crude oil to produce an in situ surfactant called soap that lowers interfacial tensions. However, this mechanism is not quantified in the literature. For example, what is the fraction of acid components which react with alkaline solution to generate soap? How much soap can be generated?

In this paper, this mechanism and related issues are discussed, analyzed or quantified. In particular, the numerical simulation approach is used. The results show that only a fraction of acid components can be converted into soap; the amount of generated soap could be low. A minimum pH (e.g. 9) is needed for the acids to be converted to soap. The literature information on the effect of amount of acid components (total acid number) on oil recovery is also discussed.

The confined compressive strength (CCS) plays a vital role in drilling optimization. On the basis of Jizba's experimental results, a new CCS model considering the effects of the porosity and nonlinear characteristics with increasing confining pressure has been developed. Because the confining pressure plays a Fundamental role in determining the CCS of bottom-hole rock and because the theory of Terzaghi's effective stress principle is founded upon soil mechanics, which is not suitable for calculating the confining pressure in rock mechanics, the double effective stress theory, which treats the porosity as a weighting factor of the formation pore pressure, is adopted in this study. The new CCS model combined with the mechanical specific energy equation is employed to optimize the drilling parameters in two practical wells located in Sichuan basin, China, and the calculated results show that they can be used to identify the inefficient drilling situations of underbalanced drilling (UBD) and overbalanced drilling (OBD).

In the high temperature, high pressure and high corrosive environment of the oil and gas drilling downhole, the weatherability of rubber sealing material has a great influence on the production safety. In order to study the important degree of every key environmental factor in downhole influencing the sealing performance of rubber sealing material, a new device of simulating downhole environment is designed to test the permeability of O-ring. The sample is hydrogenated nitrile O-ring and orthogonal experiment method is used to do nine tests by getting three levels from temperature, pressure and CO₂ volume fraction. Test adopts fuzzy orthogonal method to analyze the main effects and the interaction between two factors, taking tensile strength, diameter variety rate and pH value of indicator as evaluation index. The results show that: the environmental factor influencing the sealing performance of hydrogenated nitrile O-ring from high to low by turns is temperature, pressure and CO₂ volume fraction, while the interaction between temperature and pressure is the most significant. It provides a new way to study the influence of downhole complex environment on the performance of rubber sealing material. Moreover, the results have important reference value to further study the failure mechanism of rubber sealing ring in many environmental factors and the rational use in engineering.

This study investigated coag-flocculation (using TFC) of PW and characterization of the post treatment settled sludge (PTSS). Effects of dosage, pH and settling time on treatment efficiency were evaluated. TFC and PTSS were subjected to Fourier transform infrared (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Thermogravimetric/Differential scanning calorimetric and Scanning electron microscopic (SEM)/Elemental analyses. Optimal treatment efficiency of 91.5% was obtained at 1 g/L and pH 2. It could be concluded that TFC was thermally stable and has potential for application as an effective bio-coagulant.

In this paper, the stick-slip vibration in oilwell drillstring is studied. The drilling system is modelled as a lumped-parameter torsional pendulum and the interaction between the drill bit and the rock is treated as Coulomb friction. Equation of motion of the drill bit is established and the dynamic responses of the drill bit are obtained. A drilling system with the drillstring length 3000 m is analysed, in which the system parameters are selected by reference to the actual drilling situation. After the slip vibrations in the initial stage, final state of the drill bit is a stable stick-slip vibration of which the limit cycle is a closed loop. In order to find the stability of the limit cycle corresponds to the periodically stick-slip vibration, different initial conditions for the drill bit are studied. Results show that the drill bit will lead to a periodic motion and the phase trajectories ultimately converge to the same limit cycle corresponds to stable stick-slip vibration.

In view of the limitations of the existing Newton fluid effects on the vortex flow mechanism study, numerical analysis of non Newton fluid effects was presented. Using Reynolds stress turbulence model (RSM) and mixed multiphase flow model (Mixture) of FLUENT (fluid calculation software) and combined with the constitutive equation of apparent viscosity of non-Newtonian fluid, the typical non-Newtonian fluid (drilling fluid, polymer flooding sewage and crude oil as medium) and Newton flow field (water as medium) were compared by quantitative analysis. Based on the research results of water, the effects of non-Newtonian rheology on the key parameters including the combined vortex motion index n and tangential velocity were analyzed. The study shows that: non-Newtonian rheology has a great effect on tangential velocity and n value, and tangential velocity decreases with non-Newtonian increasing. The three kinds of n values (constant segment) are: 0.564(water), 0.769(polymer flooding sewage), 0.708(drilling fluid) and their variation amplitudes are larger than Newtonian fluid. The same time, non-Newtonian rheology will lead to the phenomenon of turbulent drag reduction in the vortex flow field. Compared with the existing formula calculation results shown, the calculation result of non-Newtonian rheology is most consistent with the simulation result, and the original theory has large deviations. The study provides reference for theory research of non-Newtonian cyclone separation flow field.

Based on the actual operational parameters of a subsea multiphase pipeline, an experimental study on the internal corrosion of a subsea multiphase pipeline was conducted in a dynamic, high-temperature autoclave, which had a similar environment to an actual field environment, using the partial pressure of CO₂ (PCO2), velocity of the corrosion medium, temperature, corrosion time, and corrosion inhibitor as variables. The results show that CO₂ resulted in severe localized corrosion and that the corrosion rate increased as the P_CO2 and velocity increased; the corrosion rate first increased and then decreased with increasing temperature. The corrosion rate peaked at approximately 65 °C and then decreased continuously afterwards; the corrosion rate decreased as the duration of the experimental period increased. Under the operational conditions of the selected subsea pipeline, localized corrosion caused by CO₂ was still the primary corrosion risk. Several types of corrosion inhibitors could inhibit the occurrence of localized corrosion for a short time period; however, most corrosion inhibitors could not completely inhibit localized corrosion.

Cusp displacement catastrophe theory can be introduced to propose a new method about instability failure of the interbed for gas storage cavern in bedded salt in solution mining. We can calculate initial fracture drawing pace of this interbed to obtain 2D and 3D gas storage shapes at this time. Moreover, Stability evaluation of strength reduction finite element method (FEM) based on this catastrophe theory can used to evaluate this interbed stability after initial fracture. A specific example is simulated to obtain the influence of the interbed depth, cavern internal pressure, and cavern building time on stability safety factor (SSF). The results indicate: the value of SSF will be lower with the increase of cavern building time in solution mining and the increase of interbed depth and also this value remains a rise with the increase of cavern internal pressure Especially, we can conclude that the second-fracture of the interbed may take place when this pressure is lower than 6 MPa or after 6 days later of the interbed after initial fracture. According to above analysis, some effective measures, namely elevating the tube up to the top of the interbed, or changing the circulation of in-and-out lines, can be introduced to avoid the negative effects when the second-fracture of the interbed may occur.