Advanced petrophysics for the characterisation of trapping mechanisms for CO2 storage in the subsurface

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This project will use the latest in petrophysical and digital rock core technology to improve our understanding of capillary and solubility trapping of CO2 in the subsurface, providing workflows and constitutive laws for a physics based representation of residual and dissolution trapping in field scale simulation. These are essential to enabling reliable modelling and assessment of potential geological CO2 storage sites.Experimental core floods with X-ray imaging at two scales - where pore scale features may be resolved in mm-scale samples in a micro XCT scanner, and where continuum properties are observed over cm-scale rock cores in a medical XCT scanner - will be combined with numerical modelling to meet the following objectives:1. Evaluate the impacts of rock heterogeneity on upscaled residual trapping, including the development of a characterisation workflow,2. Observe rates of mass transfer between CO2 and brine as a function of fluid flow rates, fluid saturations, fluid-fluid interfacial areas, distance from chemical equilibrium of the fluid system and length scale, including the development of a constitutive law to represent these rates in reservoir simulationContinuum numerical models of rock cores will be constructed, based on these observations of residual trapping in heterogeneous rock cores. Initial upscaling from these small size scales will be performed to develop an indication of the parameter space in which small scale heterogeneities must be characterised for accurate predictions of field scale trapping.