Dispersive Mixing in Multicomponent Multiphase Flow: Numerical and Physical Effects

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Title
Dispersive Mixing in Multicomponent Multiphase Flow: Numerical and Physical Effects

CoPED ID
4306243f-4441-443c-9bd8-7f46bf53b377

Status
Closed

Funders

Value
£663,772

Start Date
Sept. 30, 2008

End Date
Sept. 29, 2011

Description

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Injection of carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions from industrial sources into depleted oil reservoirs and deep saline aquifers is one viable way to combat global warming. The U.K. has the potential to take the lead in developing technologies for CO2 capture and storage because of the vast storage capacity of oil reservoirs in the North Sea. Moreover, maintaining current levels of hydrocarbon production is critical to U.K. energy security and CO2 injection is a proven method for increasing oil recovery in the North Sea.CO2 injection into oil reservoirs typically results in water, oil and gas fluid phases simultaneously flowing through porous reservoir rocks. Interaction between phase behaviour and flow determines the amount of additional oil recovered and CO2 storage efficiency. There is a critical need to develop an understanding of the fundamental physics in multiphase subsurface flow in order to ensure that existing mathematical models and the simulators used to approximate them are correct. Analytical solutions for displacements with components that partition between three phases are available, but it is not clear whether they model the true physical displacement which includes the dispersive effects of molecular diffusion and capillary pressure. The sensitivity of simulated displacements to numerical dispersion (numerical errors that, like physical dispersion, tend to smear sharp fronts in fluid composition) cannot be simply determined from the sensitivity for equivalent two-phase displacements.This project will be the first to rigorously study dispersive effects in multicomponent multiphase flow at a fundamental level. The goals of this project are to derive physically correct dispersion models for multicomponent multiphase flow and to implement them in a three-dimensional streamline-based reservoir simulator. When this project is completed, the simulator will be used to design efficient CO2 storage and enhanced oil recovery projects with a higher-degree of certainty that stored CO2 will remain in oil reservoirs for geologic time.

Tara LaForce PI_PER

Subjects by relevance
  1. Emissions
  2. Oil
  3. Physics
  4. Simulation
  5. Carbon dioxide
  6. Climate changes
  7. Oil production
  8. Reservoirs
  9. Simulators
  10. Flow
  11. Hydrodynamics
  12. Carbon capture and storage

Extracted key phrases
  1. Multicomponent Multiphase Flow
  2. Dispersive Mixing
  3. Oil reservoir
  4. Oil recovery project
  5. Numerical dispersion
  6. Physical Effects
  7. Numerical error
  8. Additional oil
  9. Reservoir simulator
  10. CO2 injection
  11. Multiphase subsurface flow
  12. Porous reservoir rock
  13. CO2 capture
  14. Correct dispersion model
  15. Phase displacement

Related Pages

UKRI project entry

UK Project Locations