Simulating Carbon Dioxide Injection, Trapping, and Storage in Digital Rock

Abstract

Mitigating climate change requires scientific breakthroughs in the area of carbon dioxide capture and storage. In this presentation, I will present our research in the area of carbon dioxide injection, trapping, and storage at pore scale. We have developed a digital rock simulation environment for creating high-accuracy capillary network representations [1] used in numerical and statistical analyses of the connected pore space. Within a rock’s capillary network, we simulate the flow of complex fluids, including carbon dioxide and brine, at realistic reservoir conditions. Specifically, we have performed series of flow simulations at elevated pressures and temperatures in which brine is displacing super-critical carbon dioxide, for quantifying the saturation levels in capillary networks of sandstone [2]. Moreover, our reactive flow simulations performed in digital rock environment demonstrate how carbon dioxide related dissolution and mineralization dynamics modify the geometric properties of the capillary network [3]. We have made our digital rock data and the simulation code available in public repositories for validation and reuse by the scientific community. References: [1] R. F. Neumann, et al. “High accuracy capillary network representation in digital rock reveals permeability scaling functions”. Sci Rep 11, 11370 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-90090-0 [2] J. Tirapu Azpiroz, et al., “Optimizing carbon dioxide trapping for geological storage”. (2023). https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.13512 [3] D. A. L. Vasquez, et al., “Geometry evolution of porous media due to coupled reactive-transport processes within capillary networks”. (in preparation).