Pore-scale mechanisms of CO2 storage in oilfields

Abdulla Alhosani, Alessio Scanziani, Qingyang Lin, Ali Q. Raeini, Branko Bijeljic & Martin J. Blunt - Scientific Reports

Rapid implementation of global scale carbon capture and storage is required to limit temperature rises to 1.5 °C this century. Depleted oilfields provide an immediate option for storage, since injection infrastructure is in place and there is an economic benefit from enhanced oil recovery. To design secure storage, we need to understand how the fluids are configured in the microscopic pore spaces of the reservoir rock. We use high-resolution X-ray imaging to study the flow of oil, water and CO2 in an oil-wet rock at subsurface conditions of high temperature and pressure.

How Amira-Avizo Software is used

The 3D pore-scale images were acquired by X-ray micro-tomography with a voxel size of approximately 2 µm, and visualized using Avizo 9.5 software. […] The oil, gas and water phase distributions were obtained by imaging at a high-resolution, 1.82 µm/voxel, the rock pore space during the experiment, while the relative permeability values were computed from flow field simulations. The connectivity maps were plotted using Avizo 9.5 software. […] Three-dimensional maps of the local thickness of gas layers computed after gas injection and second water flooding were visualized using Avizo 9.5 software