Speaker
Description
Open fractures in saline aquifers can significantly alter CO₂ migration and trapping, increasing uncertainty in storage performance and capacity estimates. At the same time, active reservoir management can generate strong groundwater flow fields that may further complicate CO₂ distribution in structurally heterogeneous reservoirs. However, direct experimental evidence for the combined influence of an open fracture and groundwater flow remains limited. This study investigates their combined effects on gas-phase CO₂ behavior through visualization experiments. CO₂ injection tests were conducted in a transparent, quasi-2D porous structure fabricated by 3D printing, with an open fracture embedded in the porous medium. The fracture orientation was varied relative to the imposed background groundwater flow, and gas migration patterns and discontinuous, unstable flow features were directly tracked. The experiments show that the presence of an open fracture and its orientation relative to background flow strongly control CO₂ migration, yielding distinct regimes characterized by intermittent advance and fragmented gas ganglia. In particular, the fracture can act as a barrier that limits buoyant rise of the CO2 gas, while the strength of this constraint depends on the background flow velocity. Increasing groundwater flow can either enhance or weaken the fracture effect depending on fracture orientation. These findings demonstrate that fracture geometry and hydrodynamic forcing jointly govern CO₂ mobility and spatial distribution, supporting the need to account for their combined effects when evaluating CO₂ storage and designing active management strategies.
This research was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (RS-2025-25414628 and RS-2024-00464096).
| Country | South Korea |
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