A Multiscale Approach to Estimate Large Scale Flow and Leakage from Geological Storage

Abstract

Deep saline aquifers offer the greatest storage capacity for geological storage. However, the formations might be extensive and because of the oil and gas legacy the aquifers are frequently perforated by abandoned wells. These wells becomes potential leakage pathways for the injected CO2. There might be as many as hundreds of thousands abandoned wells in a saline aquifer, which make obtaining accurate and robust estimates for the flow in these systems a major challenge. In this thesis a multiscale approach have been used to couple a FEM well leakage model and a ELSA well leakage model, in order to achieve a multiscale model that would estimate the large scale flow and leakage from geological storage on extensive domains. In the search after a radius for the fine scale solver it was discovered that a well is hardly affected by the coarse scale solution, due to the radius of influence of a well. Hence, the derived model is not a multiscale model and is not able to estimate the flow in the system.