The Impact of Dynamic Dissolution on Carbon Dioxide Sequestration in Aquifers
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- With the increasing concern about global warming, many technologies have been developed to help mitigate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to the atmosphere. The technology investigated here is the injection of CO2 into deep aquifers, which offer substantial potential for safely sequestering the CO2 currently being emitted from the burning of fossil fuels. Such aquifers are generally unused for drinking or agriculture (because of their high salinity) and provide a very large storage capacity. The fluid flow properties associated with this type of CO2 sequestration have been considered to be well understood for CO2 in the gaseous phase and the supercritical phase, as a result of several earlier studies. However not all of the fundamental behaviors of CO2 and water have been considered. Due to its solubility, CO2 dissolves significantly into the aqueous phase giving rise to so-called ‘solubility trapping’, a mechanism that has also been investigated in earlier studies. However, the two-phase flow behavior becomes significantly more difficult to predict when both water (containing dissolved CO2) and gaseous or supercritical CO2 are flowing, while the dissolution process is occurring simultaneously. In particular, the fluid flow of gas- liquid mixtures in which ‘active phase change’ is taking place is a sparsely understood area of flow through porous media, and has not been investigated in the context of sequestration of CO2. Therefore the overall goal of this project has been to investigate the importance of active phase change and mass transfer on CO2-water two-phase flow and determine the impacts this phenomenon has on CO2 sequestration. Importantly, the issue of dissolution phenomena in CO2-water systems may allow for improved sequestration of CO2 without needing to go to the extreme depths required to achieve supercriticality, while reducing the risk of CO2 escaping to the atmosphere. The concepts of solubility sequestration have been investigated by others, how- ever the importance of the interaction between dissolution and relative permeability seems to have been overlooked - all of the previous studies that we encountered have treated relative permeability as an invariant and have not taken account of changes to the two-phase flow characteristics as dissolution and evolution of CO2 take place. Experimental observations of the differences between N2-water and CO2-water flow in our research have shown that relative permeability of CO2-water systems is affected strongly by CO2 dissolution. The consequences of these phenomena on sequestration are unknown but are likely to be of considerable significance.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | November 2008 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Stacey, Robert W. |
|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Horne, Roland N. |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Department of Energy Resources Engineering |
Subjects
| Subject | School of Earth Energy & Environmental Sciences |
|---|---|
| Genre | Thesis |
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Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Stacey, Robert W. (2008). The Impact of Dynamic Dissolution on Carbon Dioxide Sequestration in Aquifers. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/yw135pd1104
Collection
Master's Theses, Doerr School of Sustainability
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