[Seminar] Convective dissolution in confined porous media: An application to CO2 sequestration

Speaker / Affiliation

Dr. Marco De Paoli / Vienna University of Technology

Title

Convective dissolution in confined porous media: An application to CO2 sequestration

Abstract

Convective dissolution in porous media is crucial for a number of geophysical subsurface flows, such as water contamination, petroleum migration and sea ice formation. In this work, we focus on the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) process, which consists of three main phases: carbon dioxide (CO2) produced from localized sources (e.g. power or industrial plants) is captured, pressurized to reach a liquid state and finally injected in underground geological formations. It is estimated that CCS can operate at least 100 years to stabilize the CO2 emission as a unique storage technology. In this frame, it is important to identify the dissolution rate of CO2 in water, to determine whether a geological formation is suitable to CO2-storage or not. The approach that is commonly used to study this problem consists of two-dimensional numerical simulations. However, experiments revealed that the scaling laws for the dissolution rate predicted numerically overestimate the real dissolution flux and may lead to an erroneous evaluation of the CO2 migration and dissolution times. This discrepancy is due to the presence non-ideal porous medium properties, which make the behavior of the flow to deviate from the ideal Darcy law. We investigated numerically and experimentally the process of convective dissolution in porous media. With the aid of 2D and 3D high-resolution numerical simulations, we analyze the influence of domain properties (anisotropy and size) on the dissolution rate. The same configuration is studied experimentally by means of Hele-Shaw cell. We performed measurements of solute concentration in the cell and we define the limits of applicability of the Darcy law.

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