The transition to efficient, affordable, reliable, and clean sources of energy is one of the major challenges of this century. Despite advances in renewable energy technologies, fossil fuels remain the primary source of energy, and are expected to remain so for decades to come. Natural gas, a relatively cleaner fossil fuel vital to many industries such as power generation, is expected to play a more prominent role in the global energy mix. However, with the decline in conventional gas discoveries, it is crucial to improve recovery from mature reservoirs to satisfy the growing demand for energy. On the other hand, the combustion of fossil fuels significantly contributes to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and climate change, an issue of major concern. CO2-based enhanced gas recovery (EGR) is a useful method to improve gas recovery, and simultaneously store CO2 securely in depleted gas reservoirs, therefore reducing net CO2 emissions. However, CO2 injection for EGR has a drawback of excess mixing with the methane therefore reducing the quality of gas produced, and leading to early breakthrough. Although this issue has been identified as a major obstacle in CO2-based EGR, few strategies have been suggested to mitigate this problem.
In this study, we propose a novel hybrid EGR method to reduce mixing and delay breakthrough. We propose the injection of a slug of carbonated water before beginning CO2 injection. Carbonated water hinders CO2-methane mixing, and reduces CO2 mobility therefore delaying breakthrough. We use reservoir simulation to assess the feasibility and benefit of the proposed method. Through a structured design of experiments (DoE) framework, we perform sensitivity analysis, uncertainty quantification, and optimization to identify the ideal operation and transition conditions. We show that the proposed method has an overall benefit for up to ~3% pore volumes of carbonated water injected. The proposed method is mainly influenced by the heterogeneity of the reservoir, slug volume injected, and production rates. Through Monte Carlo simulation we show that high recovery factors and storage ratios can be achieved while keeping recycled CO2 ratios low. These results are encouraging and highlight the overall benefit of the proposed hybrid EGR method.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:kaust.edu.sa/oai:repository.kaust.edu.sa:10754/673720 |
| Date | 07 1900 |
| Creators | Omar, Abdirizak |
| Contributors | Hoteit, Hussein, Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division, Patzek, Tadeusz, Vahrenkamp, Volker |
| Source Sets | King Abdullah University of Science and Technology |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | 2022-11-22, At the time of archiving, the student author of this thesis opted to temporarily restrict access to it. The full text of this thesis will become available to the public after the expiration of the embargo on 2022-11-22. |
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