Characterizing Small-scale Migration Behavior of Sequestered CO2 in a Realistic Geologic Fabric

Abstract For typical field conditions, buoyancy and capillary forces grow dominant over viscous forces within a few hundred meters of the injection wells resulting in remarkably different fluid migration patterns. Reservoir heterogeneity and fluid properties are principal factors influencing CO 2 migration pathways in the buoyancy/capillarity regime. We study the effect of small-scale heterogeneity on buoyant migration of CO 2 in this regime. Capillary channel flow patterns emerge in this regime, as characterized by invasion-percolation simulations in a real meter-scale 2D geologic domain in which sedimentologic heterogeneity has been resolved at sub-millimeter resolution. As the degree of heterogeneity increased in synthetic media, CO 2 migration patterns exhibited a spectrum of structures, from ‘dispersed’ capil lary fingers with minimal rock contact to back-filled’compact’ distributions of saturation with much larger storage efficiency.

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