@article {132, title = {Subcontinuum mass transport of condensed hydrocarbons in nanoporous media.}, journal = {Nat Commun}, volume = {6}, year = {2015}, month = {Apr-22-2015}, pages = {Article Number: 6949}, abstract = {

Although hydrocarbon production from unconventional reservoirs, the so-called shale gas, has exploded recently, reliable predictions of resource availability and extraction are missing because conventional tools fail to account for their ultra-low permeability and complexity. Here, we use molecular simulation and statistical mechanics to show that continuum description--Darcy\&$\#$39;s law--fails to predict transport in shales nanoporous matrix (kerogen). The non-Darcy behaviour arises from strong adsorption in kerogen and the breakdown of hydrodynamics at the nanoscale, which contradict the assumption of viscous flow. Despite this complexity, all permeances collapse on a master curve with an unexpected dependence on alkane length. We rationalize this non-hydrodynamic behaviour using a molecular description capturing the scaling of permeance with alkane length and density. These results, which stress the need for a change of paradigm from classical descriptions to nanofluidic transport, have implications for shale gas but more generally for transport in nanoporous media.

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}, issn = {2041-1723}, doi = {10.1038/ncomms7949}, author = {Kerstyn I. Falk and Benoit A. Coasne and Roland Jean-Marc Pellenq and Franz-Josef Ulm and Lyd{\'e}ric Bocquet} }