Process-based upscaling of reactive flow in geological formations

Abstract

Recently, there is an increased interest in reactive flow in porous media, in groundwater, agricultural and fuel recovery applications. Reactive flow modeling involves vastly different reaction rates, i.e., differing by many orders of magnitude. Solving the ensuing model equations can be computationally intensive. Categorizing reactions according to their speeds makes it possible to greatly simplify the relevant model equations. Indeed some reactions proceed so slow that they can be disregarded. Other reactions occur so fast that they are well described by thermodynamic equilibrium in the time and spatial region of interest. At intermediate rates kinetics needs to be taken into account. In this paper, we categorize selected reactions as slow, fast or intermediate. We model 2D radially symmetric reactive flow with a reaction-convection-diffusion equation. We show that we can subdivide the PeDaII phasespace in three regions. Region I (slow reaction); reaction can be ignored, region II (intermediate reaction); initially kinetics need to be taken into account, region III (fast reaction); all reaction takes places in a very narrow region around the injection point. We investigate these aspects for a few specific examples. We compute the location in phase space of a few selected minerals depending on salinity and temperature. We note that the conditions, e.g., salinity and temperature may be essential for assigning the reaction to the correct region in phase space. The methodology described can be applied to any mineral precipitation/decomposition problem and consequently greatly simplifies reactive flow modeling in porous media.