InterPore2025

Safe and Efficient CO2 Sequestration in Subsurface Aquifers: Viscosity Enhancement, Physics of Displacement, and Numerical Modeling

22 May 2025, 17:35

45m

Oral Presentation (MS27) Invited & Plenary Speakers Plenary Lecture

Speaker

Abbas Firoozabadi (Rice University)

Description

CO2 has gas like viscosity and liquid-like density. Injection in the subsurface results in wide distribution and possibility of leakage. Direct visocosification of CO2 at low concentration requires engineering of new molecules that can be effective in the subsurface conditions. The phase behavior description of water/brine and CO2 is still an unresolved issue. Advances are being made for accurate and efficient phase behavior description. Phase behavior computations have been recently advanced for large scale simulations.
The physics of flow of water/brine and CO2 has complexities that have not been recognized until recently. In most publications, the capillary pressure is assumed to be zero at the core outlet in lab scale. Recent X-ray CT scanning shows the boundary conditions even in Lab scale may be revisited.
The most challenging problem has been large scale flow simulations. When CO2 dissolves in water/brin, there is density increase. Gravity fingers develop from adverse density effects. Most large-scale flow simulators cannot capture the gravity fingering properly. The domain discretization by 3D fully unstructured gridding, and higher-order methods have been recently integrated in dynamic adaptive gridding.
The presentation combines recent advances in various aspects of the problem leading to large scale modeling of CO2 sequestration in subsurface aquifers.