How fluids flow through shale

Current drilling and fracturing methods can’t extract oil and natural gas very well, recovering an estimated 5 percent of oil and 20 percent of gas from shale. That’s partly due to a poor understanding of how fluids flow through these small pores, which measure only nanometers across. But new computer simulations can better probe the underlying physics, potentially leading to more efficient extraction of oil and gas.

(via WSJ)