Three University of Oklahoma researchers are developing a program capable of simulating the unique conditions of shale gas reservoirs.

Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy professors Richard Sigal, Faruk Civan and Deepak Devegowda are the first to systematically tackle that challenge, according to the university.

When it is completed, their simulator is expected to provide oil and natural gas companies with an essential tool for managing production and choosing drilling locations.

The team's research is supported by more than $1 million from the Research for Partnership to Secure Energy for America, with an additional $250,000 from six oil and gas producers.

Sigal said OU's industrial partners on the project include a variety of large and small independent companies, including Oklahoma City's Chesapeake Energy Corp.

Jeff Miller, Chesapeake's vice president of geoscience technology, said the simulator project is not limited to the university.

"This project is part of Chesapeake's ongoing research being conducted both in-house by our own engineering technology and geoscience technology groups and in conjunction with industry and academic institutions," Miller said.

"This study will help us more accurately predict production from unconventional reservoirs using reservoir simulators."

Sigal said he was drawn to the project because he is interested in gas production, which is easier to model than oil production. He also cited his belief that the industry must guard against climate change.

"If you burn natural gas, you produce a lot less (carbon dioxide) and, in almost every other way, it's cleaner than burning oil and certainly much cleaner than burning coal," he said. "If we have a large domestic source of natural gas, it makes sense to use as much of it as we can."

OU's simulator project is necessary, Sigal said, because shale is so different from conventional reservoirs found to be home to oil and natural gas. Shale formations retain more of the water used in hydraulic fracturing than other rock formations.

He said some of the pores in the shale are much smaller than those in other reservoirs so a different set of equations must be used for simulations.

"Predicting long-term gas production with history matching requires more accurate physics and geology," Sigal said. "Using a new $2 million microscope at OU to see the detailed porosity of the rocks, Professor Carl H. Sondergeld and his collaborators have found two kinds of pore space in the rocks. Besides the inorganic pore space where we expect to find gas, they discovered pores the size of nanometers in the organic portion of the rock.

"This discovery needs to be incorporated into the simulator design."

Sigal said the OU researchers intend to create a module that can be fit into existing simulators.

He said the new technology also will help companies allay the fears of property owners concerned that gas production will contaminate their drinking water.

"Current commercial simulators do not successfully predict the amount of water produced," Sigal said. "Researchers need to model the deposition of this water to better understand the reservoir and address concerns the effects this water can have on shallow aquifers.

"One goal of the simulator project is to determine and provide the capacity to model frac water deposition."

He said the new simulator would help producers plan their projects by understanding the conditions that will improve a well or kill it.