Evaluation of Various Pulse-Decay Laboratory Permeability Measurement Techniques for Highly Stressed Coals

The transient technique for laboratory permeability measurement, proposed by Brace et al. (J Geophys Res 73:2225–2236, 1968) and widely used for conventional gas reservoir rocks, is the preferred method when testing low-permeability rocks in the laboratory. However, Brace et al.’s solution leads to considerable errors since it does not take into account compressive storage and sorption effect when applied to sorptive rocks, such as, coals and shales. To verify the applicability of this solution when used to characterize fluid flow behavior of coal, an in-depth investigation of permeability evolution for flow of helium and methane depletion was conducted for San Juan coals using the pressure pulse-decay method under best replicated in situ conditions. Three permeability solutions, Brace et al.’s (1968), Dicker and Smits’s (International meeting on petroleum engineering, Society of Petroleum Engineers, 1988) and Cui et al.’s (Geofluids 9:208–223, 2009), were utilized to establish the permeability trends. Both helium and methane permeability results exhibited very small difference between the Brace et al.’s solution and Dicker and Smits’s solution, indicating that the effect of compressive storage is negligible. However, methane permeability enhancement at low pressures due to coal matrix shrinkage resulting from gas desorption can be significant and this was observed in pressure response plots and the estimated permeability values using Cui et al.’s solution only. Therefore, it is recommended that Cui et al.’s solution be employed to correctly include the sorption effect when testing coal permeability using the transient technique. A series of experiments were also carried out to establish the stress-dependent permeability trend under constant effective stress condition, and then quantify the sole contribution of the sorption effect on permeability variation. By comparison with the laboratory data obtained under in situ stress/strain condition, it was verified that accelerated CBM production can be achieved by reducing the horizontal stresses.