Study of reactive flow, ground deformation and real-time tomography with applications on CO₂ sequestration

• Main Author: Wang, Haoyue, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Other Authors: Brian Evans and Bradford Hager., Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2016
• Subjects: Earth; Atmospheric; and Planetary Sciences; Carbonic acid
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/104596

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, 2016. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (pages 119-128). Geological sequestration of CO₂ is an option to either mitigate or defer global warming and avoid dangerous climate change. Carbon dioxide is also injected into reservoirs to increase resource extraction. Currently, the rate of CO₂ injection in pilot sequestration plants or the enhanced oil recovery commercial projects is a few million tons CO₂ per year at best, while there are tens of billion tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions. These sequestration projects will have a tangible impact only if they can be scaled up, which will require a solid understanding of the underlying physics and a portfolio of monitoring tools to curb operation risks and the potential of leakage. In this thesis I describe work that bears on three aspects of these complicated issues: Experiments and a new computational model on the reactive flow of carbonic acid in limestone, an assessment of the surface uplift owing to sequestration of CO₂ in a carbonate saline aquifer, and a validation of a new, real-time, tomography method that monitors the velocity change resulting from hydraulic fracturing. In Chapter 2, a network approach that models the formation of wormholes from reactive flow of high concentration carbonic acid in limestone is devised. In this model, the pore space is partitioned into two parts, the bigger subset of the pore network as a leading sub-network while the reminder of porosity comprises a set of identical secondary sub-networks: the reactive flow problem is framed as the competition of reactive fluid among these sub-networks. This approach saves computational resources by approximating the large fraction of slowly changing part of the pore space as a number of identical coarse networks. Using material constants appropriate to the conditions of the experiments, the model successfully grows wormholes that ...