Experimental and Modeling Study of Capillary/Buoyancy-driven Flow of Surrogate CO2 through Intermediate-scale Sand Tanks

Abstract

The role of capillary forces during buoyant migration of CO2 is critical towards plume immobilization during post-injection of geological carbon sequestration. However, the inherent heterogeneity of most candidate reservoirs makes it very challenging to evaluate the effects of capillary forces on the storage capacity of these formations and to assess in-situ plume evolution. Given the technical challenges in characterizing deep reservoir's migration and trapping phenomena, the development of carefully controlled laboratory experiments allows recreating the interplay of governing forces that are expected in-situ. Visual observations, complemented by saturation measurements across homogeneous and heterogeneous sand packs, provide direct insight into capillary/buoyancy-dominated flow processes, allowing assessment of predictive ability of existing and new two-phase flow simulators.