Publication Details |
| Category | Text Publication |
| Reference Category | Journals |
| DOI | 10.1016/j.geoen.2024.213509 |
Licence  |
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| Title (Primary) | Fast mass transfer processes of interfering trapped CO2-clusters at reservoir conditions: Experiment and theory |
| Author | Geistlinger, H.; Zulfiqar, B.; Koehne, J.M.; Schlueter, S.; Apelt, B.; Amro, M. |
| Source Titel | Geoenergy Science and Engineering |
| Year | 2025 |
| Department | BOSYS |
| Volume | 245 |
| Page From | art. 213509 |
| Language | englisch |
| Topic | T5 Future Landscapes |
| Abstract | The
gas-to-oil ratio (GOR) of a reservoir fluid plays a critical role in
optimizing oil recovery and oil production strategies, improving oil
recovery efficiency, and predicting reservoir behavior. Understanding
the complicated kinetics of multicomponent mass transfer at the pore
scale after gas injection into petroleum reservoirs is of great
importance for estimating GOR and enhanced oil recovery (EOR). However,
to date, there is a significant gap in the fundamental process
understanding of the complex mass transfer process at reservoir
conditions. Using micro-CT technology, we investigate the time
dependence of CO2 mass transfer and cluster growth after high pressure CO2 injection into sedimented porous media (sintered 0.2 mm glass beads). Surprisingly, the CO2 partitioning equilibrium is already reached after 2 h. To the best of our knowledge, such a fast CO2 transport through water-saturated porous media, which cannot be explained by linear diffusion models (time scale 100 days for a diffusion length of 10 cm), has not been reported in the literature before. We proposed a conceptual model that assumes CO2 inflation of interfering gas clusters drives cascading CO2 transport. We verified this conceptual model through a time series of experiments at different initial gas saturation, analyzing in each case the spatial cluster distribution, cluster size distribution, and pore occupancy frequency. Whether CO2 inflation of the gas clusters occurs depends on the critical initial gas saturation, which is about 10%. Our main conclusion is that CO2 migration should be considered as gas phase diffusion cascading along a quasi-percolating cluster, since CO2 inflation leads to a high gas saturation of about 26%, which is close to the percolation threshold. Our experimental results support this physical hypothesis. We show for the first time that CO2 clusters can expand over large pore spaces and thus are close to the critical percolation threshold (mobility threshold). The cluster size distribution can be described by a power distribution with the critical exponent 2.19, i.e., it shows universal scaling. We model the interfering mass transfer processes of neighboring gas clusters with a multi-sphere model. Exploring different scenarios for the dissolution kinetics of an ensemble of interfering gas clusters allow a deeper understanding of the complicated mass transfer kinetics and agree well with experimental cluster analyses at specific times. |
| Persistent UFZ Identifier | https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=30006 |
| Geistlinger, H., Zulfiqar, B., Koehne, J.M., Schlueter, S., Apelt, B., Amro, M. (2025): Fast mass transfer processes of interfering trapped CO2-clusters at reservoir conditions: Experiment and theory Geoenergy Sci. Eng. 245 , art. 213509 10.1016/j.geoen.2024.213509 |
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