The Impact of Including Heterogeneity into the Simulation Model for the Evaluation of CO2 Injectivity and Sequestration

Abstract We study the influence of including heterogeneity into earth models of a flow simulation for a prediction of the injected CO 2 behavior. Multiple heterogeneous earth models are generated from seismic and geological prior information in a stochastic manner. The flow simulations are performed with the heterogeneous models as well as a homogeneous model at one of the proposed storage site. The variation of the results for the heterogeneous models is significant and the large amount of CO 2 is migrated into the seal layer compared to the homogeneous case. Although CO 2 leakage from the seal layer is observed for a few models, the leakage mass ratio is less than 1 percent. The result suggests that even if a reservoir and a seal are not homogeneous, the both layers can work as a storage layer in the whole system.