Mixing behaviour of methanol stored in depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs to support the European Union energy transition

Power-to-Methanol is considered as an additional option to Power-to-Gas to convert surplus energy from renewable sources and the electric grid into storable energy carriers. In this context, methanol is an alternative fuel to power combustion engines, and it can be applied to produce chemical feedstock such as formaldehyde required for polymer production, hydrocarbons, gasoline and olefines, as well as gasoline additives and especially as an energy carrier and carbon sink.

As long-term storage of energy carriers is required to realise the transition of the energy sector to renewable sources scheduled in the European Union, the fact that storage of methanol requires less operational and safety efforts compared to natural gas or hydrogen is a significant benefit, i.e. methanol does not require any compression prior to its injection into geologic subsurface reservoirs, while being biodegradable and of generally low environmental toxicity. Existing hydrocarbon transport and storage infrastructure can be directly applied to transport and store methanol in the geologic subsurface. In this context, a major concern besides methanol biodegradability is its high miscibility with water, potentially resulting in relevant storage losses that may favour uneconomic storage operations in active groundwater aquifers. Hence, the present study aims at a quantitative assessment of the mixing behaviour of methanol and water based on a reference numerical simulation benchmark previously applied to investigate that of CH₄ stored in a CO₂ cushion gas within a depleted natural gas reservoir (Oldenburg et al., 2003, Ma et al., 2019, and others). For that purpose, the TRANSPORTSE numerical simulator (Kempka, 2020), applicable to simulate fluid flow as well as transport of heat and reactive transport of chemical species (Kempka et al., 2022) is used in the present study. Mixing ratio-dependent density and viscosity changes as well as different reservoir dipping angles are considered to determine the chemical storage efficiency in view of mixing losses. Simulation results demonstrate that methanol fraction-driven variations in fluid density and viscosity of up to 20 % and 30 %, respectively, as well as the relatively low diffusion coefficients compared to those of gases result in low mixing degrees of both liquid components. Structural geological features need to be considered in the selection of methanol storage sites, since these directly affect the spatial extent of the mixing region, and thus methanol recovery efficiency.

 

Kempka, T., Steding, S., Kühn, M. (2022) Verification of TRANSPORT Simulation Environment coupling with PHREEQC for reactive transport modelling. Advances in Geosciences, 58, 19-29. https://doi.org/10.5194/adgeo-58-19-2022

Kempka, T. (2020) Verification of a Python-based TRANsport Simulation Environment for density-driven fluid flow and coupled transport of heat and chemical species. Advances in Geosciences, 54, 67-77. https://doi.org/10.5194/adgeo-54-67-2020

Ma, J., Li, Q., Kempka, T., Kühn, M. (2019) Hydromechanical Response and Impact of Gas Mixing Behavior in Subsurface CH₄ Storage with CO₂-Based Cushion Gas Energy & Fuels 33 (7), 6527-6541. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.9b00518

Oldenburg, C. M. (2003) Carbon Dioxide as Cushion Gas for Natural Gas Storage. Energy Fuels 17(1), 240−246. https://doi.org/10.1021/ef020162b