Abstract
Underground storage in geological aquifers is one of the most important options for large-scale mitigation of CO2. During the supercritical CO2 (scCO2) injection process, water dissolved in scCO2 may have significant impact on the displacement process. In this study, a series of wet scCO2 (WscCO2, 100% water saturation) and dry scCO2 (DscCO2, 0% water saturation) displacement experiments were conducted in micromodels for a large range of flow rates. The displacement was visualized using fluorescence microscopy. Results showed that DscCO2 saturations were up to 3.3 times larger than WscCO2 saturations when the capillary fingering dominated the displacement. The specific interfacial areas and mobile fractions for the DscCO2 displacements were also much larger than those for WscCO2. The capillary forces combined with drying effects are identified as the leading causes for the considerably higher DscCO2 sweep efficiency. Results from this study showed the important impact of mutual solubility of scCO2 and water on the displacement process and saturation of scCO2 (SscCO2), suggesting that the conventional model describing the relationship between capillary pressure and SscCO2 needs to be modified for the effect of the mutual dissolution of multiple phases to more adequately describe the scCO2 displacement process in saline aquifer formation.
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Acknowledgements
All experiments in this research were performed at the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory (EMSL), a national scientific user facility sponsored by the US Department of Energy’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research and located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, operated for the Department of Energy by Battelle.
Funding
This work was supported by the 973 Program of China [Grant number 2014CB239205]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant numbers 41304081]; and Open fund of State Key Laboratory of Oil and Gas Reservoir Geology and Exploitation (Southwest Petroleum University) [Grant numbers PLN201601].
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Wang, Y., Wei, N., Zhang, C. et al. Experimental study of drying effects during supercritical CO2 displacement in a pore network. Microfluid Nanofluid 22, 101 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10404-018-2122-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10404-018-2122-9