Mohamed Regaieg1*, Zakaria El Abid 2, Erwann Camberlin 3
1 TotalEnergies SE
2 ENSTA
3 ENSEIRB-MATMECA
Digital Rock Physics (DRP) provides a new way to compute rock properties and carry-out related sensitivity analysis to complement laboratory measurements. In DRP, the first step is to obtain micro-CT images of a rock, this is then followed by segmenting the images to distinguish the rock...
Abstract: Coal is a porous medium that contains multi-scale pores with a pore aperture from millimeter level to nanometer level. The pore aperture differential can reach one million orders of magnitude, which causes the multi-scale characteristics in space and time for coal permeability and significantly influences gas drainage. However, the current experiment and theory of steady-state...
During the exploration of natural gas hydrate reservoirs, the macro-scale spatial heterogeneity of hydrate sediments is caused by the formation of hydrates, which makes it difficult to predict the hydrate saturation accurately. In this study, random simulation methods are used to construct digital rocks under three types of hydrate growth habits (Grain-Coating, Pore-Filling, and Patchy), and...
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques have been used extensively for studying fluid behaviour in porous rocks, mainly through complementing other experimental processes, such as core flooding, as well as through NMR logging techniques. Common applications of these methods include determining the pore size distribution of the porous media, wettability characterization and fluid...
For an efficient field implementation of MEOR process, crucial microbial, formation rock and physicochemical properties, and operational parameters must be characterized and optimized. The present study numerically investigates the impacts of nutrient competition, toxicity, pulse injection time (t_pulse), media heterogeneity, and microbial reversible attachment and detachment rates on tertiary...
Wettability is an essential property in terms of structural trapping, which is considered to be the primary mechanism of CO2 geological storage [ref. 1]. Illite, a dioctahedral 2:1 phyllosilicate of common occurrence in soils and sedimentary rocks, is one of the main components of the caprock [ref. 1]. In this study, we focused on the interface of carbonated water and illite. This interfacial...
Shale gas is becoming an increasingly important source in the global energy sector. The shale reservoir is characterized by the small porosity and ultra-low permeability, and the shale gas production decays rapidly with time. In the process of gas production, shale is expected to deform in response to gas adsorption and desorption, similar to many other nanoporous materials. Despite the...
Variably saturated flow in porous media is an important process of interest in many applications related to agriculture, geotechnics, sustainable water resources management. Its modeling has great issues in engineering and research & development, and the use of the “quite classical” model combining the Richards’ Equation (RE) and constitutive laws (e.g., van Mualem – van Gencuhten or Brooks –...
For the solar-driven thermochemical fuel production redox cycle, the porous media design significantly determines the solar-to-fuel efficiency and per mass loading conversion efficiency of each redox cycle by governing the heat and mass transfer properties. Thermodynamically, porous media is expected to have a large surface area for fast reaction rate and a large mass loading for high fuel...
Hydrogen will have a major role in low-carbon energy transitions, and it is vital to develop hydrogen storage facilities to accommodate widespread implementation. Underground hydrogen storage (UHS) offers a widely available large-scale and long-term storage option, but this storage technology lacks experimental efforts of multiphase hydrogen flow. We use microfluidics to experimentally...
Aquifer Thermal Energy Storage (ATES) has significant potential to decarbonise heating and cooling in regions with seasonal climate variations. These systems often target freshwater aquifers, which are also used to produce drinking water. Therefore, a major concern when developing ATES is to ensure that operation of the system will not create or redistribute pollutants in the targeted aquifer...
Permeability is a key parameter to control material and energy transport in porous media. However, the anisotropy of permeability makes it difficult to measure accurately in laboratory. In this paper, a detailed theoretical analysis of the anisotropic porous media flow process is carried out, and it is found that all physical quantities exhibit point-centered symmetry during the...
The carbonate clastic shoal reservoirs in the Middle Permian Maokou Formation has been proved to be outstanding oil/ gas-generating strata. Clastical shoal reservoirs are mainly developed in Maokou-2 and Maokou-3 Members, where Maokou-1 Member is mostly wackstone and packstone. However, with the gas producting under the instructing of in-stu gas generating and enrichment theory, unconventional...
The three-dimensional digital core, which describes the microstructure of the rock on the pore scale, has become the basis for quantitative analysis of the pore structure and physical properties of the rock. The microscopic pore structure of rock greatly affects its seepage properties. Permeability is a parameter that characterizes the ability of a rock to conduct fluid, and it is one of the...
The thinner the reservoir thickness is, the greater the heat loss after steam overpass, so there were few successful examples of steam flooding in heavy oil reservoirs less than 6 meters all over the world. However, similar thin-layer heavy oil reserves account for a large proportion in Bohai oilfield, so it is urgent to carry out steam flooding after huff and puff to further improve oil...
Capillary pressure is the difference in pressure across the interface between two immiscible fluids and is dependent on interfacial tension, pore size, and wettability. Understanding capillary pressure is crucial in determining hydrocarbons production, CO2 and/or hydrogen underground storage. Capillary pressure laboratory measurement is performed by mercury injection, porous plate, or...
The injection of supercritical CO$_2$ into shale gas reservoirs, fracturing the reservoir, enhancing shale gas recovery and achieving CO$_2$ geological storage, is regarded as an optimum scheme in carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) due to the distinctive physical properties of supercritical CO$_2$, e.g. a low viscosity, high diffusion coefficient, high adsorption capacity and zero...
Driven by the aims to drastically reduce CO2 emissions in several different sectors within the next decades, such as in the transport or the industrial production sectors, the substitution of fossil fuels by “green” hydrogen is widely considered. The hydrogen is “green” when it is produced emission-free and based on the use of renewable energy sources. Electrochemical splitting of water inside...
In the last decades, shale oil, mainly distributed in organic nanopores of shale, has been considered as the representative of unconventional energy to alleviate the energy crisis. Kerogen plays a complex and key role for adsorption and transport behaviors of shale oil, and the ideal pore models greatly overestimate the flowing capability of shale oil, thus it is crucial to identify the...
The hydrogen/oxygen evolution reaction (HER/OER) has been well-studied for design and synthesis of efficient electrocatalysts. To further enhance electrode performance, the hierarchical porous architecture is used to obtain large surface area and efficient mass transport. Recent studies were performed to reveal the impact of porous/mesh electrode surface wettability on bubble dynamics, which...
Geo-storage of hydrogen (H2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) is a promising solution for a low-carbon global economy (Ali, 2021; Ali et al., 2022a; Ali et al., 2021b; Bui et al., 2018; Pan et al., 2021b). The knowledge of the capillary entry pressure of caprock is critical, which provides a rapid assessment of the capillary sealing efficiency and sealing capacity, particularly in the presence of...
Algal biomass is a reasonable feedstock for the production of bio-energy and valuable bio-chemicals. Thermochemical techniques such as pyrolysis, liquefaction, and gasification are eminent approaches to produce biochar from the biomass in the absence of oxygen. Pyrolysis is proposed as an effective method compared to other techniques due to its operating state. Biochar is a porous, largely...
The demand for additive manufacturing is on the rise in the optical industry. Notably, 3D printing provides solutions to most limitations inevitable for conventional processes. 3D printing offers novel design and fabrication of complex geometries rapidly and cost-effectively. Here, we demonstrate the fabrication of functionalized optical device (4D Fresnel lens) for the first time using a...
Reactive transport modeling is a powerful numerical tool to assess the spatiotemporal evolution of chemical reactions occurring in porous media across different scales (pore, core, and field scales). The geostatistical information required to initialize the petrophysical fields for core-scale reactive transport modeling is often missing and thus need to be assumed. The objective of this work...
Abstract: Stress sensitivity is a typical reservoir damage. Before large-scale development of tight gas reservoir, a correct understanding of reservoir stress sensitivity is very important for the protection and efficient development of tight sandstone gas reservoir. Therefore, taking the tight sandstone cores of the lower accumulation assemblage in the southern margin of the Junggar Basin...
In England and Wales, groundwater provides around a third of public water sources (British Geological Survey,1998). However, the intense industrialised past of the country has caused significant pollution in some of its important aquifers. The northeast area of England, where groundwater contribution is estimated to be 20% to public supply per region (British Geological Survey, 2019), stands...
This work presents a mathematical model to describe the dynamics of perfusion in cardiac tissue. The new model extends a previous one [1] and is able to reproduce clinal exams of contrast-enhanced cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of the whole heart (3D) obtained from patients with cardiovascular diseases, such as myocardial infarct.
The new model treats the extravascular and...
Heterogeneous catalysts are a broad and versatile set of engineered porous materials, of high surface area and surface functionalization. Automotive catalysts have removed billions of tons of pollutants from entering the atmosphere since their deployment in the 1970s1 and must withstand life long service lives. Their structure-property relationships are complex, determined by porosity,...
Previous studies have highlighted the great potential of shales as geological barriers thanks to their favourable properties (very low permeability, high capillary entry pressure, swelling properties). However, the response of shales is governed by Thermo-Hydro-Chemo-Mechanical (THMC) couplings of high complexity, often making their study challenging. The difficulty arises mainly from the fact...
Hydrogen has a critical role in meeting the UK’s commitment to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. The transition towards net zero has been estimated to require 250-460TWh of hydrogen, making up 20-35% of the UK’s final energy consumption in 2050. To facilitate hydrogen supply at the required scale, subsurface hydrogen storage in porous geological formations is essential. In the context of...
Porosity and permeability are particularly important parameters in the petroleum industry, where the possibilities of hydrocarbons exploitation depend on reservoir properties. The computational methods have become more popular in the analyzes of fluid flow and heat transfer in porous media. The flow of gas at the microscale differs with respect to flow at the conventional scales [1]. The...
Reactive transport in saturated/unsaturated porous media is numerically upscaled to the space-time scale of a hypothetical measurement through coarse grained space-time (CGST) averages. The one-dimensional reactive transport is modeled at the fine-grained Darcy scale by the actual number of molecules involved in reactions which undergo advective and diffusive movements described by global...
Soil water retention curves (SWRCs) are key inputs to feed Richards’s equation-based hydrological models. Knowing that these models play a role in a wide range of societal issues, they must be based on reliable data. SWRCs are usually obtained in laboratory on soil samples using one/some of the available methods. Although some studies show that different non-harmonized elements of the...
Accurate knowledge of pore space in fault zones in stratified carbonate and marl sequences is important because fault zones play an important role in reservoir properties (e.g. Agosta et al., 2010, Caine et al., 1996). However, estimating pore space in these structures is difficult due to their heterogeneity, and sampling is also complicated due to the often non-cohesive properties of fault...
The wetting and drying cycles of salt solutions confined in conductive nanoporous electrodes are conceived to generate energy from low-grade waste heat by coupling the pore drying/wetting process with the charging/discharging cycles of the electrodes. The key factor being the surface area of the electrode in contact with the adsorbing/desorbing liquid films. This objective could be realised by...
Carbon capture and storage in deep saline aquifers is a promising approach to mitigate global warming as a first-rate challenge of the world today. The injected CO2 dissolves in brine, making it acidified and promoting geochemical interactions with the rock. Such interactions likely alter CO2 trapping and transport mechanisms, which are directly linked with the carbon mitigation...
Successful geologic CO2 storage projects depend on numerical simulations to predict reservoir performance
during site selection, injection verification, and post-injection monitoring phases of the project. These numerical
simulations solve non-linear sets of coupled partial differential equations, while accounting for multi-phase fluid
dynamics on the basis of constitutive equations that...
The textile industry is the major source of dyes and generates colored wastewater Colored dye effluents are generally considered to be toxic to the animal and plant life of a particular region and habitat. Moreover, almost all dyes are poorly biodegradable or resistant to environmental conditions and, therefore, create major problems in the treatment of wastewater stemming from the dyeing...
Extraction of information from volumetric core data is highly dependent on the quality of the acquired images and processing. Segmentation of the 3D image helps separate the pore networks from the rock matrix using the process of binarization. The processing done by the user turns out to be subjective and there exists a trade-off between resolution and field of view for the features of...
Spontaneous imbibition controls the movement of water into natural and engineered porous such as building and construction materials, including stone, concrete and cement. We measured the sorptivity – the imbibition rate – for a homogeneous Bentheimer sandstone for both initially dry and wet conditions for three replicate experiments and matched the measurements to an analytical model to...
It is of great significance to study the physical properties of hydrate-bearing sediments (HBSs) for improving the recovery of the gas hydrate resource. Previous studies reveal that the hydrate distribution patterns and saturations affect the physical properties of HBSs. However, the experimental techniques are difficult to investigate the effects of hydrate distribution patterns and current...
As the advantage of directly extracting microstructure information and simulating multiple petrophysical scenarios, estimating permeability from rock images became prevail for studying fluid flow in porous media, which is a fundamental problem in subsurface hydrocarbon recovery, CO2 underground storage, and geothermal development. This study aims to directly compare three commonly-used...
Fractured-vuggy carbonate reservoirs are characterized by strong heterogeneity. In a multi-fracture system, compared with secondary fractures and matrix, the main fracture has stronger conductivity, and it is of great significance to investigate the fluid flow characteristics in the main fracture.
Based on this, combined with actual reservoir conditions, a fracture core model and a visualized...
Hydraulic fracturing is a key technology for the efficient development of unconventional reservoirs (such as shale and tight sand reservoirs). Formation pressure depletion and fracture closure due to the development of oil and gas reservoirs cause low production. Thus, it is necessary to implement stimulation measures, such as refracturing or layered fracturing. However, fracturing fluid...
Physics Informed Neural-Networks (PINNs) is an emerging field that is gaining credence among the scientific computing community. By embedding domain knowledge into machine learning models, PINNs allow for long-term, accurate, consistent, and generalizable spatiotemporal predictions that are rooted in physics while leaving room for data assimilation. In addition, the PINNs approach is...
Tight oil and gas exploration and development has made important progress in the world, and its resource potential and prospect are widely concerned. However, tight reservoir network system formed by the development of pores, micro fractures and artificial fractures is complex, which makes it difficult to study the microscopic flow law of tight reservoirs. Combined with X-CT images, the cores...
To better understand asphaltene deposition mechanisms and their influence on rock permeability and wettability, we have developed an in situ micro-CT imaging capability to observe asphaltene precipitation during multiphase flow at high resolution in three dimensions. Pure heptane and crude oil were simultaneously injected to induce asphaltene precipitation in the pore space of a sandstone rock...
Hydrogen energy has enormous potential for playing an important role as a clean fuel in energy transition. We have studied hydrogen transport in a sandstone porous media pre-saturated with brine at pore scale. Volume of fluid method was used to study the transport of hydrogen in sandstone porous media under different wetting conditions. The main purpose of this study is to determine the effect...
There are pore and fracture media in a volcanic gas reservoir, and two-phase gas-water flow is possible. However, there are few research on the effect of volcanic reservoir type, capillary number and wettability on 3D gas-water two-phase flow from pore scale. This paper aims to study the distribution, evolution and influencing factors of natural gas in different reservoir media during...
Reactive boundary conditions are employed to model an increasingly wide range of transport scenarios (e.g., [4];[1];[5]). While the capability of a variety of computational schemes for reliable description of such reaction-diffusion processes at the boundary of a given domain has been assessed in the literature [2], the effects of hydrodynamic processes on the rates of reactions taking place...
Pyroclastic rock is a transitional rock between magmatic lava and sedimentary rock. The content and particle size of pyroclastic are difficult to determine, thus, the identification of lithology is difficult. The traditional lithology identification methods including various kinds of cross-plot, cluster analysis and other methods, lack of geological concept and physical dependence. What’s...
Wave-induced fluid flow (WIFF), as an intrinsic attenuation mechanism, is a significant mechanism in causing seismic attenuation and dispersion in saturated porous media. However, the fact that the WIFF is related to the complex structure of porous media is always ignored. Since the fractal nature of rocks is revealed, make it possible to study the fluid flow in different scales in a flexible...
Flow in porous media is ubiquitous in many engineering and natural systems, many of which occur in the geosphere and are intimately linked to energy, environment, and water resources. Transport phenomena in a porous domain is closely linked to the pore-scale velocity structures, thus an important ingredient in development of transport models is having reliable pore-scale experimental velocity...
The flow law of two-phase flow in complex porous media can be used to explain the variability of development efficiency during the displacement, imbibition, and huff-and-puff process with different construction parameters. Therefore, with the help of nuclear magnetic resonance, micro-CT (micro computed tomography), and tracer method, core samples and microfluidic chip experiment are commonly...
We have studied the chromatographic separation of solvents and dyes after deposition of a dye solution on a paper substrate. Due to their larger molecular size, dyes typically exhibit a stronger interaction with the paper constituents. Consequently, the imbibition process of the dye is usually delayed compared to that of the solvent. This impacts the achievable resolution and color homogeneity...
Characterization of geologic heterogeneity is crucial for reliable and cost-effective subsurface management operations, especially in problems that involve complex physics such as field-scale carbon storage and unconventional oil and gas operations. With recent advances in computational power and sensor technology, large-scale aquifer characterization using various types of measurements has...
A brief introduction of the EIS technique , precedes the presentation of the two experimental setups, with planar and respectively cylindrical electrodes. Home made devices have been employed to study material properties (e.g. dielectric constants) of complex materials as well as physical phenomena as water evaporation of aqueous mixtures, complex liquid transport into porous paper, latex...
A fundamental understanding of multiphase flows in porous media is relevant to the process of CO2 sequestration, remediation of contaminated aquifers, or Enhanced Oil Recovery. These processes are greatly influenced by a phenomenon known as snap-off. Snap-off is a complex pore-scale mechanism responsible for the break-up of the invading fluid at the entrance of a pore-throat, it leads to the...
We present the design of a prototype for the prediction of permeability from 2D microstructural image data. Fault rocks of a normal fault in a Jurassic limestone-marl sequence in northern Bavaria, Germany, are analyzed for the algorithmic integration of microstructural data (light microscopy and scanning electron microscopy) with petrophysical measurement results (including He pycnometry and...
The Effects of pore-space morphology on multiphase fluid displacement in porous media has been studied extensively in literature (1-3). The general understanding is that, among other factors, pore-space morphology controls the type and importance of pore-scale events that occur during multiphase fluid displacement and hence governs the final fluid saturation distribution. In this research we...
The changes in the porosity and permeability characteristics of rocks under overburden pressure often have a series of effects on the development of oil reservoirs, especially for unconventional reservoirs. In order to study the porosity and permeability characteristics of unconventional reservoir under overburden pressure, a large number of overburden porosity and permeability experiments on...
Ureteral stents are effective in alleviating flow disruptions in the urinary tract, whether due to ureteral stones or either intrinsic or extrinsic ureteral obstruction. Stents are also used following various endourological and surgical procedures that can affect the ureter, to promote urine flow until edema decreases and incisions heal. However, significant stent encrustation and incrustation...
To examine the drying kinetics inside a spray dryer, it is essential to understand the heat-induced transformation of a single colloidal droplet into a solid dry particle. During the last decades, numerous researchers applied acoustic levitation to perform single droplet drying experiments using a standing ultrasound wave to immobilize the droplet in one of its pressure nodes. Even if this...
Application of inkjet printing as a versatile technique has gain a great attention during last decade. Not only in paper printing industry but also in pharmaceuticals, electronics, sensors, etc. In order to deliver the highest print quality possible, the droplet landing, distribution and penetration into the media needs to be well controlled. In this paper, we studied the ink, containing...
Oil reservoirs are composed of several combinations of matrices, fractures and cavity systems, which result in various properties of porosity, permeability and fluid transport behavior [1]. Thus, the problem of flow through a reservoir in the presence of karsts is complex and the predictive capabilities related to the flow and transport processes remain severely limited.
In this work, we...
Different artificial intelligence methods are evaluated for the construction of surrogate models of the flow of the Requena-Utiel and Cabrillas-Malacara aquifers, in Valencia, Spain. The objective is to provide a quick, open, and minimally accurate tool that allows managers to assess the impact of possible changes in the flows extracted from existing wells and the impact of rainfall on the...
In this work, a two-equation macroscopic continuum model (CM) is developed that accounts for the local non-equilibrium mass transfer in a drying capillary porous medium. The two-equation CM is based on the volume averaging method and the formulation is formally derived from the upscaling of the pore-scale mass conservation equations of the liquid and vapor phases, where the respective state...
The wettability of reservoir rocks affects oil recovery, relative reservoir fluid flow, the capillary pressure, and the electrical characteristics of the formation, by strongly impacting the spatial distribution of fluid phases in the pore space. We investigate the effect of different aging methods on wettability restoration of strongly water-wet carbonate core plugs having similar...
This study presents a series of 3D single-phase microscale simulations for flow of Newtonian and shear-thinning fluids through a sandstone and a carbonate samples over a range of flow velocities. Due to the requirements of multiple simulations and long computation times, the image size was chosen based on the representative elementary volume for porosity and permeability. Critical velocity was...
Microfluidic devices offer unique opportunities to directly observe multiphase flow in porous media. However, as a direct representation of flow in the 3D pore networks of geological formations, conventional microfluidics face several challenges.
One is the ability of microfluidic networks to represent steady two-phase flow without fluctuating occupancy of locations in the network. The...
The two-phase flow of water and oil is accompanied by the emulsification process at the interface between the fluids. The compositions and rate of formation of these emulsions can strongly affect the predicted oil recovery. However, it is a scientific challenge to study and characterise the emulsions formed during the flow in porous media since their properties are not reproducible in ex-situ...
The main objective of a gel treatment in most mature oil fields is to improve the homogeneity of the reservoir by blocking highly permeable channels or fractures without damaging productive zones. In recent decades, Cr(III)-polyacrylamide (HPAM) gels have been extensively applied as blocking agents for sweep efficiency improvement. However, the gelation time of the current gels is not long...
Physicochemical properties serve as crucial indicators on reactive solute transport and soil structure evolution in porous media, meanwhile structural heterogeneity of soil significantly alters physicochemical properties via redirecting solute transport path. Key biogeochemical processes such as precipitation – dissolution (PD) is essential to reactive solute transport in porous media, yet...
Shale oil reservoir has different fabric facies (lamellar, thin lamellar, massive, etc.) rock based on lamina development degree and longitudinal superposition relationship of different lithology. Laboratory tests show that the spontaneous imbibition recovery rate of shale with different fabric facies is different, and the difference of pore structure is the main reason. In this paper,...
The oil/water transition zone contains a significant portion of original oil in place (OIIP) especially for those tight sandstone formations with rather small pore diameter and high capillary pressure.As the buoyancy balanced with the capillary force, the water saturation changes from 1.0 at the free water level to the irreducible water saturation at the top of the transition zone....
Knowledge of hydraulic properties is crucial for understanding and modeling fluid flow in thin porous media. In this work, we have developed a new simple custom-built apparatus to measure permeabilities of a single thin fibrous sheet in in-plane direction. The permeability was measured for two types of thin fibrous porous materials using either water or gas phase. For each thin fibrous layer,...
Due to multi-stage tectonic movement and dissolution, many fractures and caves are dispersed in the fracture-cavity reservoir. According to reservoir characteristics and formation reasons, fracture-cavity reservoirs can be divided into weathering crust, fault-controlled, and underground river types. The fault-controlled type is the most difficult reservoir to develop, divided into the karst...
Relative permeability modifiers (RPMs) have been utilized for controlling excess water in fractured shales1. The polymers that are employed as RPMs have the capability of dramatically decreasing water relative permeability with a less impact on gas relative permeability 2, 3. In the study outlined within we have aimed to control excess water in low permeability carbonate gas reservoirs using...
Mineral nucleation and growth are prime examples of (geo)chemical reactions giving rise to geometry evolution during reactive flow and transport in porous media. The precipitation reactions can reduce porosity, alter pore space connectivity and morphology, modify tortuosity, and deteriorate permeability. Therefore, change the fluid flow and solute transport. Additionally, precipitation...
Saline intrusion (SI) in coastal aquifers is a global problem with the potential to contaminate groundwater used by over a billion people. The problem is becoming more widespread due to increased groundwater abstraction in response to urbanization combined with natural phenomena such rising sea levels due to climate change or storm surges. Accurate modelling and prediction of SI in coastal...
One of the most important methods for increasing the oil recovery of petroleum reservoirs is gas injection. However, it will not result in good oil recovery in many cases due to a low volumetric sweep efficiency. Foam flooding emerged as a promising solution for improving gas flooding. Still, there are significant concerns regarding the use of foam due to its un-stability in reservoir...
Representing the fine-scale heterogeneities of geological formations is computationally expensive in the modeling of geothermal processes. Upscaling is necessary for efficient modeling, using coarser grids and average rock and fluid properties. In modelling geothermal doublets, the breakthrough time of injected cold water at the production well is critical to project viability. Breakthrough...
In multi-mineral fractured rocks, the altered porous layer on the fracture surface resulting from preferential dissolution of the fast-reacting minerals can have profound impacts on subsequent chemical-physical alteration of the fractures. This study adopts the micro-continuum approach to provide further understanding of reactive transport processes in the altered layer, and mass exchanges...
At present, carbonate reservoirs mainly rely on primary and secondary oil recovery. However, the complex pore structure leads to large production decline in the early stage of depletion development, and the distribution of oil and water in the reservoir is very uneven in the process of water injection. The key to solve these series of problems is to clarify the micro occurrence characteristics...
The porosity and permeability relationships in carbonate reservoirs are complicated and do not have an easily derivable upscaling functions due to the complex multi-scale pore systems and diagenetic history during the formation of the reservoir. This paper aims to share a proof-of-concept microporosity study in the Central Luconia carbonate fields, Malaysia that is based on 2D and 3D imaging...
Microfluidic devices allow direct observation of multiphase flow in porous media. However, as a direct representation of flow in the 3D pore networks of geological formations, conventional microfluidics face a challenge in representing steady two-phase flow without fluctuating occupancy of locations in the network. In a separate presentation (Cox et al., 2022) we show that such flow is...
Multiphase flow in porous media widely exists in many natural and industrial processes, such as enhanced oil/gas recovery, geological CO2 sequestration,. Wettability is one of the key factors that affects multiphase flow in porous media. In this study, by means of high-resolution imaging in microfluidic flow cells patterned with random pore network, we performed displacement processes that...
A nitrogen-assisted steam stimulation test (NSST) was firstly carried out to evaluate potential for improving recovery of CN Reservoir, a typical heavy oil reservoir with high formation oil viscosity (447~577mPa•s) and strong bottom water drives. Unexpectedly premature water breakthrough and rapid water rising, however, occurred in a surrounding general production (SGP) well at early stage of...
A profound understanding of the fluid flow characteristics in porous media is essential in various industrial and engineering applications such as enhanced oil recovery, geological CO2 and H2 storage, geothermal energy storage, groundwater remediation, and pharmaceutical engineering. In this study, lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) is utilised for 3D simulation of fluid flow through two porous...
The cleaning of porous media is ubiquitous and the difficulties associated with cleaning such materials are numerous. Surface contamination may ingress inside the pore space and become inaccessible to a cleaning flow. This makes it very difficult to monitor the levels of contamination throughout the medium and determine whether cleaning has been successful. The addition of a surface washing...
The quantification of fluid flow properties and residual non-wetting phases in petroleum reservoirs is essential to understand hydrocarbon recovery or CO2 storage capacity of the subsurface reservoirs. Specific core experiments used to derive such properties, e.g., trapping curves and relative permeabilities can be time-consuming, difficult to conduct and sometimes not representative for the...
Due to shallow mud invasion in unconventional reservoirs such as tight sandstone, shale, the dielectric dispersion logs have advantage in the saturation evaluation of unconventional reservoirs. Dielectric dispersion logs had been applied in the evaluation of unconventional reservoirs in North America with good results. A large number of unconventional reservoirs are found in the basins in...
Many real-life applications are dependent on the physics of multiphase flow in porous media. Some important examples are geological carbon sequestration [1], enhanced oil recovery [2] , and remediation of groundwater/soil contaminated by a non-aqueous phase liquid (NAPL) [3]. The predictability and efficiency of the aforementioned scientific and industrial applications rely on developing a...
Viscous fingering is a topic of interest for long period, it renewable with the beginning of computational fluid dynamics. Here we focus on the classical constellation of non-miscible displacement, as it has been investigated in Hele-Shaw cells. A first fluid front is entering with another second fluid that has different properties. The pure flow is destabilized by the Saffman-Taylor...
Given the complex physical and chemical processes, several controlling mechanisms have been proposed to explain the oil remobilization due to low-salinity effects. Osmosis and water-in-oil emulsification are among these mechanisms. However, our knowledge of these processes is limited and their associated time scales are not well understood. To verify their roles, we conducted a series of...
The oil or gas producing shales are ultra-tight source rock predominantly containing organic rich consolidated formation of clay-sized particles. The clay content severely limits the fluid flow within the shale matrix. It is, therefore, necessary to understand the organic content, level of thermal maturity, mineral composition, natural fractures, shale porosity, pore structure and...
In the present work, numerical simulation experiments were performed to examine the influence of fractures on the flow of dissolved CO2 plumes using the density driven (i.e., convective mixing) model. Porous media domain with a size of 500 m by 200 m (x-z plane) was used in the present work. The impacts of fracture aperture, fracture angle and fractures intersection on the movement of CO2...
Solute transport containing particles is essential in various applications, including filtration industry, subsurface contaminant transport in hydrology or environmental engineering, formation damage in the petroleum industry, and subsurface biocolloids or microorganism transport [1-4]. The evolution of pore-scale structure because of particle retention is a complicated process, which is a...
Nanoparticles have proven to overcome several challenges above traditional chemicals used for EOR. Silicates compounds are the most abundant on earth, making silicon-based nanoparticles highly compatible with most of the reservoirs, environmentally friendly, and a cost-effective nanofluid option for EOR. Silicon-based nanofluids coupled with other chemicals such as surfactants and polymers can...
The flow of non-Newtonian fluids through porous media is of great importance for various applications, such as heavy oil recovery, polymer enhanced oil recovery, and liquid polymer molding. Understanding these processes, however, is a challenging task as the topology of the pore space results in a wide range of flow velocities and shear rates and consequently to variation of effective fluid...
The present work focuses on the impact of gas bubble dynamics on effective acoustic properties in partially saturated poroelastic media. It's key objective is the bubbles’ interface mechanics on various length scales. The analysis starts from a single air bubble embedded in surrounding water. The classical Minnaert solution [Minnaert 1933] is covered by first taking into account the bulk...
X-ray and optical contrast agents are widely used in porous media research in order to image fluid displacement processes. The field of application is wide and reaches from microfluidics (optical and fluorescence microscopy) to core floods and in the latter form the continuum (medical CT) to the pore scale (micro CT). In all these applications, the contrast is increasing with the increasing...
3D digital rock is widely used in the oil and gas industry to analyze pore structures and estimate petrophysical properties of rocks, such as permeability, elastic modulus, resistivity, and nuclear magnetic resonance response. Computed tomography (CT) images are the most common data for constructing 3D digital rock. However, the CT experiment is expensive, and rocks are not easy to obtain in...
The geological disposal of radioactive waste is designed to confine radioactive nuclides for a long period of time based on the concept of a multiple barrier system consisting of engineered and natural barriers. In this study, the hydraulic conductivity of mudstone and granite as natural barrier materials and high strength and ultra low permeability concrete (HSULPC) as engineered barrier...
The phase behavior of fluids becomes abnormal in shale formations due to the presence of extensive nanoscale pore spaces. Prior research has demonstrated that this so-called nanoconfined phase behavior—driven by the presence of significant capillary pressure and interaction between hydrocarbons and the pore wall (i.e., competitive adsorption)—is a function of the pore size and geometry....
The size and distribution of grain have great influence on the micro-scale displacement mechanisms. Coupled Cahn–Hilliard phase field and Navier–Stokes equations were solved using finite element method to simulate two-phase flow in homogeneous and heterogeneous models, respectively. Several heterogeneous models were conducted with different heterogeneity intensity and distribution. In both...
To support effective geological CO2 capturing and storage design and operations, the dissolution and precipitation of the CO2-Brine-rock system were simulated to investigate the chemical interactions within the system concerning the effect resulted from change in their thermodynamics properties. Geochemical models were built using PHREEQC software to represent surface, injectivity and...
Multiphase reactive flow in porous media is fundamental in many areas of subsurface science and engineering, such as mineral dissolution by acidic injection and hydrate decomposition. Pore scale simulation is an effective method to deeply investigate the mechanism of reactive mass transfer in porous media. Soulain presented a micro-continuum approach to simulate reactive flow at pore scale in...
With the rapid development of the world economy, the demand for energy, especially oil, is increasing. Therefore enhanced oil recovery (EOR) has become an essential part of crude oil exploitation. EOR consists of a recovery process by the injection of materials not existing in the reservoir. At present, four primary techniques of EOR are available in industry: Gas flooding, thermal injection,...
Global warming due to greenhouse gases has been a major concern over the years. CO2 is among the most common greenhouse gases that has been released in significant quantities and hence the demand for its reduction. Recently, adsorption technology in particular clay minerals has drawn attention as a low cost, environment friendly means of carbon capture. The major drawback in adsorption...
Global production of plastics has increased exponentially over the past few decades. Annual production of plastics increased nearly 200-fold in 2015 compared to the production of nearly 2 million tones per year in 1950 (1). Estimates suggest that of the estimated 6.3 billion tones of plastics produced up to 2015, almost 80 percent has not been disposed of properly (2). Soil represents a large...
Freezing and thawing experiments were carried out in the laboratory on fully saturated sand sample (15 cm in diameter and 20 cm in height). The column sand, packed into the PVC container, was well insulated by foam materials at the bottom and on sides, whereas the top of the sample was covered by a stainless steel plate to allow the heat flux between the sand and the ambient environment in the...
- Objectives/Scope:
Microfluidics is an emerging technology that has gained attention by the industry for its capabilities to investigate and visualize fundamental recovery mechanisms at the pore scale in a microdevice, mimicking, to some extent, the actual rock pore-network. While current technologies are capable of building micromodels that are either water-wet or oil-wet, a technique to...
The membrane morphology significantly influences membrane performance. For osmotically driven membrane processes, the morphology strongly affects the internal concentration polarization. In this work, different membrane morphologies were generated by simulation and their influence on membrane performance was studied. The simulation results were experimentally validated for two classical...
To limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C, significant reduction of fossil fuel usage and promotion of zero-carbon, renewable energy solutions are essential. Energy sector is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG), dominated by space heating and cooling demand. The 5th generation district heating and cooling networks, that are designed to operate at near ground temperature,...
Permeability is usually considered to be related to porosity. However, rocks with the same porosity may have different permeabilities in some cases, because of the variations in pore and throat size and pore space connectivity. It is vitally important to understand the effect of throat size on the transport property. In this work, five sets of regular pore network models and six core−based...
The fate and transport of contaminants associated with agricultural soils have important implications for groundwater quality and public health. Intricacies of the pore structure control how water flow is distributed and consequently how dissolved chemicals are transported in the subsurface. We hypothesize that the structural heterogeneity generated by different agricultural land management...
Nonaqueous phase liquid (NAPL) contaminants which persist in subsurface environments due to low solubility and flow heterogeneity may be more accessible to chemotactic bacteria in bioremediation contexts. Chemotactic bacteria bias their swimming motion upon sensing chemical gradients, such as performing longer runs toward sources of chemoattractants (e.g., naphthalene), which increases the...
The research focused on the simulation of the previous experiment described by Princ et al. (2020). The relationship between entrapped air content (ω) and the corresponding satiated hydraulic conductivity (K) was investigated for two coarse sands, in the experiment. Additionally the amount and distribution of air bubbles were quantified by X-ray computed tomography.
The pore-network...
Composites “Salt Inside Porous Matrix” (CSPMs) are promising materials for atmospheric water adsorption/generation. In this work, CSPMs were synthesized by impregnating porous SAPO-34 with hygroscopic salts (LiCl and/or CaCl2), and further functionalized with incorporation of graphene oxide (GO). The physicochemical, morphological, and textural properties of the resulting hybrids were...
Brazil is a water-rich country with nearly 90% of its freshwater lying on its subsurface[1]. Brazilian groundwater plays a crucial role in the water supply as 16% of the population depends solely on it[2]. However, rising anthropogenic contamination threatens this resource, especially in urban areas, industrial districts, and storage areas[1]. The most prevalent contaminants –petroleum and...
The hydraulic properties of porous media extensively depend on their pore structure as described by the size, arrangement, and connectivity of pores. The current work aims to provide a numerical simulation of the evolution of the pore size distribution (PSD) during oedometric compaction of Zbraslav sand. Apart from the derived unsaturated hydraulic properties, we will be particularly...
We address the possible generalization of the methods for the estimation of effective pore size distributions from the saturated permeability experiments with non-Newtonian fluids. In the standard procedure of the yield-stress fluid method (YSM, see [1]) or the later method by Abou Najm & Atallah (see [2]), the flow through the porous sample is one-directional, with both the flux and the...
Multiphase fluid flows are ubiquitous in many natural phenomena and industrial applications such as oil production, purifying water systems, heat exchangers, etc. Analytical analyses of multiphase flow are limited to simplified cases due to the complex nature of real phenomena. Experiments can reveal main aspects of complex systems, but not concurrently provide detailed information about the...
Multiphase fluid behavior in nanoporous materials is of interest for various science and engineering applications, including geoscience applications, chemical and material engineering, and biological sciences. In the context of geoscience applications, nanoporous rocks have considerable importance as low-permeability seals for geologic carbon sequestration or nuclear waste disposal and as...
Wettability is a controlling property for multi-phase processes, and therefore an important input to simulate multi-phase processes in porous media. Conventionally, wettability is assumed to be a constant property throughout the medium, despite the common knowledge that it is not uniform in natural porous media. Under two-phase conditions, every three-phase contact line conveys information...
The human placenta is an essential organ for the developing fetus, which relies on well-orchestrated haemodynamics to deliver its multiple functions [1]. The geometrical complexity of the placenta and lack of appropriate animal models mean that biomimetic laboratory models offer a powerful tool to investigate haemodynamics and haemorheology in the human placenta and other complex biological...
The key to accelerate research and production in the energy industry resides in the efficient and generally applicable determination of physical properties of reservoir rocks. Here, we present recent advancements in the generation of statistical digital twins of reservoir rocks, in a workflow that may commonly be applied to any grain-based sample. Digital twins and the modeling of reservoir...
The depletion of conventional oil/gas reserves has led to the extensive exploitation of hydrocarbon-rich organic source rocks. However, recovery of hydrocarbons from kerogen, the main organic component of shales, has proved to be complicated due to the strong impact of kerogen microporosity on fluid transport. In order to understand the nature of solid-fluid couplings and its impact on fluid...
Coal-seams or coal deposits are not only critical to global energy supply but also recognized as a potential reservoir/ target formation for geologic carbon dioxide CO2 storage. Detailed understanding of coal-CO2 interaction and assessment of reservoir performance are fundamental for successful design and operation of coalbed CO2 storage strategies. Coalbeds are complex porous media consisting...
Enhance Oil Recovery (EOR), especially Chemical EOR (CEOR) methods are applied to extract by-passed or capillary-trapped oil from subsurface formations. These methods have the potential to reduce the carbon intensity of the produced oil and therefore will play important role during energy transition. Water-soluble polymers with non-Newtonian behavior are usually added to water to increase the...
It is known that conventional coagulation/flocculation, sedimentation, and filtration techniques are partially efficient in removing extracellular-soluble cyanotoxins and compounds in water, therefore, advanced water treatment methods are often used instead. Conventional methods of remediating persistent pollutants from aqueous and gaseous phases mainly employ chemical precipitation, ion...
Saline water evaporation from porous media may result in salt precipitation within the pore system influencing transport properties of porous media (Dashtian et al., 2018). Porosity is one of the key characteristics which could be modified due to salt precipitation. Understanding the nature and extent of porosity reduction as a result of salt crystallization is crucial in understanding...
A 3D numerical model is presented to analyze the behavior of gas flow in hydraulically fractured horizontal wells in anisotropic heterogeneous naturally fractured reservoirs with triple porosity (organic and inorganic matrix, and natural fracture network). This model generalizes the models proposed presented previously in the technical literature so far in relation to the combined of the...
