Speaker
Description
In depleted gas fields considered for CO₂ storage, rapid pressure drops and Joule–Thomson cooling can shift near-well conditions into the hydrate stability region, where hydrate may influence injectivity. Predicting hydrate impacts remains challenging because nucleation, growth, and dissociation depend on pore-scale two-phase morphology, contact-line physics, and coupled transport processes that evolve during injection. Here we combine pore-scale micromodel imaging with an advanced Lattice Boltzmann (LB) framework to resolve these mechanisms and connect them to flow-path impairment.
Experimentally, we investigate pore-scale hydrate formation and evolution in a “fish-bone” micromodel operated at fixed pressure and temperature within the CO₂ hydrate stability window. Dry CO₂ injection over a range of flow rates generates capillary-fingering morphologies with connected gas pathways and residual water. Hydrate formation is analysed with respect to the evolving two-phase configuration, with particular attention to gas–water–solid contact-line regions, local connectivity, and transport accessibility. We quantify the spatiotemporal development of hydrate deposits and assess how continued dry-gas injection can modify local water activity and thereby alter the balance between net hydrate accumulation and retreat along flow paths.
Numerically, we introduce a coupled pore-scale LB model combining free-surface hydrodynamics with an advection–diffusion–reaction module for dissolved CO₂. The model represents CO₂ dissolution across a moving gas–liquid interface, triggers stochastic heterogeneous nucleation using a CNT-inspired hazard formulation linked to local supersaturation and interfacial geometry, enforces stoichiometric mass-balanced hydrate growth consuming dissolved CO₂ and water, and limits continued growth through an explicit hydrate-shell diffusion resistance.
Overall, the experimental observations anchor the pore-scale physics, and the LB framework enables controlled studies across broader conditions to inform reduced-order descriptions and upscaling of hydrate effects on flow.
| Country | United Kingdom |
|---|---|
| Student Awards | I would like to submit this presentation into the Earth Energy Science (EES) and Capillarity Student Poster Awards. |
| Acceptance of the Terms & Conditions | Click here to agree |
