The significance of heterogeneity for spreading of geologically stored carbon dioxide

Sammanfattning: The demand for large scale storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) grows stronger as incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are introduced. Geological storage sites such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs, unminable coal seams and deep saline water-saturated aquifers are a few of many possible geological storage sites. Geological formations offer large scale storage potential, hidden locations and are naturally occurring world wide. A disadvantage is the difficulty to investigate the properties of storage material over large areas. Reservoir simulation studies addressing issues of heterogeneous reservoirs are growing in number. There is still much to investigate however this study adds to the field by investigating the significance of the heterogeneity in hydraulic conductivity based on core sample data. The data was received from the main CO2 injection site Heletz, Israel in the European Union Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development (EU FP7) project MUSTANG (CO2MUSTANG, 2011-03-13). By developing models using iTOUGH2/ECO2N, the aim of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of how the average permeability, variance in permeability and spatial correlation of the reservoir properties affect the distribution of CO2 within the deep saline aquifer target layer. In this study a stochastic simulation approach known as the Monte Carlo method is applied. Based on core sample data, geostatistical properties of the data are determined and utilized to create equally probable realizations where properties are described through a probability distribution described by a mean and variance as well as a constructed semivariogram. The results suggest that deep saline aquifers are less storage effective for higher values of average permeability, variance in permeability and spatial correlation. The results also indicate that the Heletz aquifer, with its highly heterogeneous characteristics, in some extreme cases can be just as storage effective as a deep saline aquifer ten times as permeable consisting of homogeneous sandstone.