The development of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has permitted the extraction of hydrocarbons from fine-grained sedimentary rocks. The key to enhancing production and reducing development risk is an improved understanding of reservoir characteristics and petrophysical properties of the shales and tight reservoirs. Recent advances in physical experiments and numerical simulation techniques have allowed scientists to study the petrophysics and the gas-water-rock interactions of unconventional resources across broad length- and time-scales.

We invite authors to submit novel research topics and review articles to advance understanding of fluid phase behavior, fluid transport mechanisms, and non-Darcy effects in nanopores of shales and other tight rocks. We are also interested in articles that explore novel and effective methods to determine petrophysical properties at different scales, for example, pore-scale modeling of fluid transport and upscaling of experiments performed on samples in the mm to cm range.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Pore structure characterization and fluid phase behavior in shales
• Characterization of sorption, diffusion, wettability, and anisotropy of permeability in shales
• Single-phase/multiphase fluid transport in tight reservoirs
• Gas-water-rock interactions in tight reservoirs
• Experimental and mathematical simulation of fluid transport in shale and tight rocks
• Pore-scale modeling of transport characteristics of shales and tight reservoirs
• Fracture characterization and proppant transport in shales and tight reservoirs
• Novel and effective methods to test and characterize petrophysical properties of tight rocks