Modeling pore-scale CO2 plume migration with a hypergravity model

Abstract

Understanding site-scale carbon dioxide migration in saline aquifers is crucial for storage safety. High time and economic costs make establishing a full-scale model of this long-term and large-scale process difficult. Hypergravity model shortens the length and time scale, which has been applied to physical modeling of two-phase immiscible displacement. To evaluate the feasibility of hypergravity modeling two-phase displacement in porous media at pore scale, CO2 migration in saline aquifer is a suitable and classic problem. We used the phase field method to simulate the vertical displacement of brine by carbon dioxide due to buoyancy and pressure at the pore scale. The pore-scale phenomena of the two-phase displacement process were obtained by assessing different flow rates with or without gravity. We systematically analyzed the feasibility of the hypergravity model to evaluate CO2 migration in the geological domain by evaluating the hypergravity effect and using dimensionless analysis. We provide suggestions for performing the hypergravity model to evaluate and predict immiscible displacement in two-phase system.