Pore Structure, Combustion, and Gas Recovery in Coal and Shale Reservoirs
This community investigates the internal architecture of coal and tight sandstone formations to understand how they store, release, and react to gases like methane and carbon dioxide, as well as how they behave during combustion and spontaneous heating.
The work centers on characterizing pore structure and size distribution using techniques such as mercury intrusion, magnetic resonance, and fractal analysis. A significant portion of the research focuses on coalbed methane and shale gas recovery, often within specific geological contexts like the Ordos and Sichuan basins in China. Parallel strands examine the mechanisms of coal spontaneous combustion, the behavior of fly ash and biomass ash during fluidized bed combustion, and the migration of trace elements and rare earths in flue gas. Recent methodological trends include the application of machine learning to predict permeability and adsorption characteristics, alongside studies on the interaction between pore networks and gas adsorption capacity in bituminous coal and tight sandstone reservoirs.
The largest share of the community's output is found in carbon research, accounting for 0.6% of all carbon research, with 5,562 papers in this group. It also represents 2.0% of mercury research (2,783 papers) and 0.6% of sulfur research (1,738 papers).
The community comprises 29,267 papers, primarily published in Fuel, Carbon, and Fuel Processing Technology.
Recent work continues to focus on the interplay between pore structure and gas recovery, with studies examining nanofluid-mediated pore regulation for coalbed methane, the desulfurization of high-sulfur coal, and the structural failure of rock masses under cyclic loading. Newer entries also explore the synthesis of dust suppression materials for coal mines and the use of transformer-based models for 3D pore network segmentation in low-permeability rocks.