Long-term Pressure Evolutions due to Geologic Heterogeneities during CO2 Injection

In general, the characterization of the heterogeneity in a reservoir is considered to be important in the exploration and selection of CO2 storage formation, but it is not clear how the heterogeneity affects the evolution of the pore pressure. In particular, long-term changes in the pore pressure when most of the storage candidates are bounded by faults or bedrock, such as Korea, have been rarely examined. Many literature related to results of studies and international CCS standardization indicate that the heterogeneity of storage formation should be identified, but it is still unclear to what extent the precision or resolution of the investigation is required at the selection or design stage. The heterogeneity of sedimentary layers can be divided into two categories in terms of geographic statistics. At this time, the criteria of the classification is statistical stationarity. From a geological point of view, the statistical stationarity may be consistent with the sedimentary environment. In other words, it can be assumed that strata deposited at the same place, at similar times, and in similar circumstances have similar hydrogeological properties, despite of some detailed differences. In this case, the heterogeneity refers to “detailed differences” and the homogeneity refers to statistical parameters such as means or variances of physical properties and spatial auto-covariance. On the other hand, the nonstationary heterogeneity refers to a case where there is no statistical homogeneity, due to differences in geological structures such as faults and differences in strata such as sandstone and mudstone. In this study, the numerical sensitivity analysis was used to investigate the effect of each heterogeneity on the pressure buildup. The nonstationary heterogeneity applied in this study is a vertical structure that completely penetrates the storage formation. The results of ten models with the stationary heterogeneity showed almost similar pressure changes in the macroscale, although there were some pore pressure differences at the injection well between each of models. The pressure difference at the injection well between each model was dependent on the bulk permeability within a certain distance (200m in this study) near the injection wells, not on the average permeability of the whole system. In other words, when the injection well is installed at a point having a relatively high permeability, some additional increase in pressure due to the heterogeneity rarely occurs. However, lowering the permeability due to nonstationary heterogeneity can causes the global pressure rise in the storage formation, results were very similar to those of the case with closed boundary condition when the heterogeneity reduced the permeability to 10-4 times or less of the permeability in the storage formation.