Speaker
Description
Biofilms, aggregates of microbes encased in extracellular polymeric substances, are intricate systems where various chemical, biological, and physical processes occur, including attachment, growth, erosion, sloughing, and metabolite formation. Underground hydrogen storage (UHS) offers large-scale energy retention solutions using salt caverns, depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs, and saline aquifers. While biofilms can be beneficial in certain applications, such as leakage remediation, the food industry, and water quality management, they can pose challenges for UHS, particularly concerning hydrogen loss and injectivity. Numerical simulations can enhance our understanding of the interactions between biofilms and hydrogen during cyclic operations involving injection, storage, and withdrawal periods.
This contribution builds on the work presented at InterPore2024, titled “Field-scale Mathematical Modelling and Simulations of Biofilm Effects in Hydrogen Storage”. The previous study developed and implemented a mathematical model for field-scale UHS simulations, incorporating biofilm processes. Key mechanisms related to microbial activity include hydrogen consumption by the biofilm and porosity reduction due to biofilm growth. The fluid is modeled as a two-phase (liquid and gas), two-component (water and hydrogen) system, while the biofilm is modeled as a solid phase attached to the rock, growing through hydrogen consumption. The mathematical model was implemented in the industry-standard simulator Open Porous Media (OPM) Flow (Rasmussen et al., 2019). The existing hydrogen module was extended to include biofilms, providing flexibility to account for or neglect biofilm effects in simulations. Results of this implementation in OPM Flow were presented using the field-scale benchmark model from Hogeweg et al. (2022).
In this year's contribution, the implementation of the mathematical model in OPM Flow is extended to include biofilm attachment and detachment. These additions introduce complex dynamics, particularly for hydrogen storage during injection, storage, and withdrawal intervals. We apply the model to assess hydrogen loss under various injection schedules and microbial parameters. The complexity of the geological models is increased from homogeneous radial reservoirs to heterogeneous field models, specifically SPE11C. For the homogeneous and heterogeneous radial reservoirs, we use the pyopmnearwell software (Landa-Marbán and von Schultzendorff, 2023), an open-source framework for creating the necessary input files for OPM Flow (e.g., injection schedules, corner-point grids, tables for saturation functions) via configuration files, ensuring reproducibility of results and facilitating further studies (e.g., optimization, history matching). For the SPE11C study, we use the pyopmspe11 software (Landa-Marbán and Sandve, submitted), a Python framework using OPM Flow for the SPE11 benchmark project. Additional open-source tools related to OPM Flow can be found at https://github.com/cssr-tools.
| References | Hogeweg, S., Strobel, G., and Hagemann, B. 2022. Benchmark study for the simulation of Underground Hydrogen Storage operations. Comput. Geosci. 26, 1367–1378. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10596-022-10163-5. Landa-Marbán, D. and von Schultzendorff, P.M., 2023. pyopmnearwell: A framework to simulate near well dynamics using OPM Flow. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10266790. Landa-Marbán, D. and Sandve, T. H., submitted. pyopmspe11: A Python framework using OPM Flow for the SPE11 benchmark project. https://github.com/openjournals/joss-reviews/issues/7357#issuecomment-2486656504. Rasmussen, A.F., Sandve, T.H., Bao, K. et al., 2019. The open porous media flow reservoir simulator. Comput. Math. Appl. 81, 159–185. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.camwa.2020.05.014. |
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| Country | Norway |
| Water & Porous Media Focused Abstracts | This abstract is related to Water |
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