Abstract:

One of the greatest concerns associated with large-scale adoption of carbon capture and storage technology is the risk of carbon dioxide leakage from sequestration reservoirs and the need to develop intervention and remediation strategies should leakage occur. Detailed sensitivity analysis of simulation models was performed to understand which fault and reservoir parameters most strongly influence leakage of CO2 from storage reservoirs. The three most important parameters, in order of sensitivity, were reservoir permeability, fault permeability and aquifer permeability. Based on these results, a semi-analytical approximation was developed which relies almost entirely on these permeabilities and the geometry of the system (ie. reservoir and aquifer height, fault thickness, etc.). While this solution does not incorporate multiphase fluid flow properties, it still provides a good approximation of CO2 leakage from a saline aquifer especially when the relative permeability characteristic curves have mobility ratios near one, which is common for Brooks-Corey relative permeability curves and viscosity ratios for supercritical CO2 and brine at reservoir conditions. The approximation is most accurate at lower leakage rates (leakage

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Copyright 2014, Christopher Zahasky: Please note that the reports and theses are copyright to their original authors. Authors have given written permission for their work to be made available here. Readers who download reports from this site should honor the copyright of the original authors and may not copy or distribute the work further without the permission of the author, Christopher Zahasky.