A study on pressure evolution in a channel system during CO2 injection

Risk assessment and feasibility studies based on numerical simulations are essential for a realisation of large scale carbon capture and storage projects. The numerical simulation of CO2 storage in deep saline aquifers, which is focused on in this study, is very demanding with respect to computational costs. During CO2 injection it is important to observe the pressure increase since it might result in caprock failure, reduction of storage capacity or brine displacement. For many reservoir parameters like e. g. the permeability only few information exists. More over the geological structure of the reservoir, e. g. the size and distribution of high permeable sand channels is often not known in detail. To deal with the resulting uncertainties the integrative probabilistic collocation method is applied to a channel system scenario. The influence of the dimension of the high permeable channel and the permeability on the pressure evolution is investigated in detail. Additionally, the maximum allowable injection rate is predicted with the method. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.