Controls of coal fabric on coalbed gas production and compositional shift in both field production and canister desorption tests

The production rates of coalbed gas wells commonly vary significantly, even in the same field with similar reservoir permeability and gas content. The compositional variation in produced gas is also not everywhere predictable, although in most fields produced gas becomes progressively enriched in CO, through the production life of a reservoir, such as parts of the San Juan basin. In contrast, it is generally observed that the ratio of CO,:CH, declines with time during field and laboratory desorption testing of coal cores. In this study, we investigate numerically the importance of coal fabfic, namely cleat spacing and aperture width, on the performance of coalbed gas wells and gas compositional shifts during production. Because of the cubic relationship between fracture permeability and fracture aperture width (and thus fracture porosity) for a given cleat permeability, the production profile of coal seams varies depending on whether the permeability is distributed among closely spaced fractures (cleat) with narrower apertures or more widely spaced fractures (cleat) with wider apertures. There is a lower fracture porosity for coal with widely spaced fractures than for coal with closely spaced fractures. Therefore, the relative permeability to gas increases more rapidly for coals with more widely spaced cleats as less dewatering from fractures is required, assuming that the fractures are initially water saturated. Increase in cleat spacing from 0.01 to 10 cm significantly enhances the peak gas production and shortens the period to reach peak production. The main stage of gas production is controlled by equilibrium desorption of gas from coals due to the relatively slow changes in reservoir pressure. The enrichment of CO2 in the production gas with time occurs because of the stronger adsorption of coals for CO2 than CH, However. during desorption of coal cores, CO2 desorbs more rapidly than methane because desorption rate is governed more by diffusion than by sorption affinity, and CO2 has much higher effective diffusivity in microporous coals than CH4. Therefore, during canister desorption, there is a rapid increase in CO, concentration in the desorbed gas followed by a steady decline in CO2 concentration, in contrast to the progressive enrichment of CO2 in produced gas from wells.