Investigating The Impact Of Relative Permeability Curves On Cold CO2 Injection

Abstract

Different injection methods have been already proposed by different researchers to improve the solubility of CO2 in the formation brine. In this study an injection technique is presented to cool down (liquefy) the supercritical CO2 in the wellbore by the use of a downhole cooler equipment. CO2 with a higher temperature enters the cooling equipment and exits the equipment with a lower temperature at the downstream in a same injection pressure. The colder (liquid) CO2 has a higher solubility in brine, higher density and viscosity which increases the security of CO2 storage. With this method the supercritical CO2 is cooled down to a liquid phase to increase the solubility at the wellbore and thus it eliminated the risk of phase change or pressure and rate fluctuation in liquid CO2 injection from the surface. To simulate this technique two cases have been considered by changing the relative permeability curves. The results show that using the combination of CO2STORE and THERMAL options shows a higher dissolution compared with only inserting the relative permeability curves corresponding the injection condition.