CO2 zonal injection rate allocation and plume extent evaluation through wellbore temperature analysis

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1-2022

Abstract

Temperature analysis during a pause in injection operations, known as warmback analysis, has been used in the petroleum industry for evaluating the injection conformance and estimating the location of the flooded front in applications, such as waterflooding oil reservoirs. In this work, methods are introduced to extend the application of temperature warmback analysis to estimate the zonal CO2 injection rate and zonal CO2 plume extent during geologic CO2 storage in a saline aquifer. First, novel analytical solutions are developed to model transient temperature in the aquifer during the injection and subsequent shut-in periods considering two-phase flow (gaseous CO2 and aqueous brine) conditions in the aquifer. The solution involves a discretization of the aquifer into regions; the energy and mass conservation equations for the regions are solved simultaneously considering appropriate boundary conditions at the interfaces. Two solutions techniques are presented: multi-region and three-region solutions. Inverse models are developed accordingly to evaluate the injection profile and estimate the extent of the plume front in the reservoir during the injection period. The multi-region solution results in an inversion approach that requires regression analysis. However, the three-region formulation results in a simple graphical technique for inverse modeling. The analytical solutions are validated against a thermally coupled reservoir simulation tool using different synthetic cases for CO2 injection in deep saline aquifers. The results of the developed solutions provide a good match with numerical results during forward and inverse modeling.

Publication Source (Journal or Book title)

Advances in Water Resources

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