Professor Ruben Juanes
PI at MIT
Professor Mohammad Sassi
PI at Masdar Institute
Despite the widespread research and development activities across the world on CO2 capture and storage in subsurface geologic formations, several fundamental phenomena related to the geomechanical and the hydrodynamical effects of super critical CO2 injection in deep saline aquifers remain poorly understood. In this collaborative, we are investigating two fundamental physical phenomena related to CO2 injection and storage in deep saline aquifers formations. The first is related to the early stage of CO2 injection in the brine saturated geological formation, and focuses on the interactions between the injected CO2 and brine flow dynamics and the induced geomechanical deformations in the deformable host rock formation. The second is related to a later stage when the buoyant CO2 forms a thin layer beneath the caprock and CO2 dissolution by convective mixing takes place. Elucidation and quantitative understanding of these phenomena is key to large-scale predictions of CO2 migration in subsurface reservoirs.
This project is directly relevant to the interests of Abu Dhabi as it will advance the state of knowledge in the underlying principles of carbon sequestration, specifically Masdar Carbon's CCS roadmap call for determining the sufficiency of deep saline aquifer CO2 storage in the UAE. This project deals specifically with understanding the phenomena that govern deep saline aquifer CO2 storage capacity. In addition, this work complements a large-scale CCS project that MASDAR/ADCO/Petroleum University have launched in collaboration with Stanford University and MIT. The collaborative project aims at obtaining an understanding of the fundamental phenomena related to the geo-mechanical and hydro-dynamical effects of supercritical CO2 injection in deep saline aquifers. The project will compliment and extend the work being done as part of the collaborative research project.
Simulation of convective mixing in a Hele-Shaw cell. The images correspond to different time levels. The domain is periodic in the horizontal direction.
