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Simulation of Gas Production from Multilayered Hydrate-Bearing Media with Fully Coupled Flow, Thermal, Chemical and Geomechanical Processes Using TOUGH+Millstone. Part 2: Geomechanical Formulation and Numerical Coupling

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Abstract

The TOUGH+Millstone simulator has been developed for the analysis of coupled flow, thermal and geomechanical processes associated with the formation and/or dissociation of \(\hbox {CH}_{4}\) hydrates in geological media. It is composed of two constituent codes: (a) a significantly enhanced version of the TOUGH+HYDRATE simulator, v2.0, that accounts for all known flow, physical, thermodynamic and chemical processes associated with the behavior of hydrate-bearing systems undergoing changes and includes the most recent advances in the description of the system properties, coupled seamlessly with (b) Millstone v1.0, a new code that addresses the conceptual, computational and mathematical shortcomings of earlier codes used to describe the geomechanical response of these systems. The capabilities of the TOUGH+Millstone code are demonstrated in the simulation and analysis of the system flow, thermal and geomechanical behavior during gas production from a realistic complex offshore hydrate deposit. In the second part of this series, we describe the Millstone geomechanical simulator. The hydrate-dependent, rate-based poromechanical formulation is presented and solved using a finite element discretization. A novel multimesh coupling scheme is introduced, wherein interpolators are automatically built to transfer data between the finite difference discretization of TOUGH+ and the finite element discretization of Millstone. We provide verification examples against analytic solutions for poroelasticity and a simplified demonstration problem for mechanically induced phase change in a hydrate sediment.

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Notes

  1. The algorithm is described in detail in ”Appendix A” of Queiruga (2015).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy, Office of Natural Gas and Petroleum Technology, through the National Energy Technology Laboratory, under the U.S. Department of Energy, Contract No. DE-AC03-76SF00098, and also through a funded collaboration with Chevron.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Petroleum Engineering Department, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA

    George J. Moridis

  2. Energy Geosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Alejandro F. Queiruga, George J. Moridis & Matthew T. Reagan

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  1. Alejandro F. Queiruga
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  2. George J. Moridis
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  3. Matthew T. Reagan
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Correspondence to Matthew T. Reagan.

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Queiruga, A.F., Moridis, G.J. & Reagan, M.T. Simulation of Gas Production from Multilayered Hydrate-Bearing Media with Fully Coupled Flow, Thermal, Chemical and Geomechanical Processes Using TOUGH+Millstone. Part 2: Geomechanical Formulation and Numerical Coupling. Transp Porous Med 128, 221–241 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11242-019-01242-w

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