Multi-scale Flow and Transport Processes in CO₂ Storage

 

The study of flow and transport in porous media continues to find applications in both traditional and emerging engineering problems, many of which occur in natural environments. Important applications include CO₂ sequestration, natural gas recovery and their combination. The design of these subsurface operations is strictly dependent on our ability to predict the fate of fluids and solutes within the complex pore network of natural systems. Rocks are in fact characterized by multiple scales, ranging from relatively wide fractures down to pores of the size of a few nanometers. The presence of pores creates intimate fluid-fluid and fluid-rock interactions, which in turn contribute to interfacial processes, such as capillarity, dispersion, adsorption, and chemical reactions.

In this lecture, Professor Pini will present results from experimental and modelling tools that he is developing in our laboratory to probe flow and transport processes in disordered porous media, such as rocks. These will be evaluated in the context of CO₂ sequestration into saline aquifers. Flow and transport are central to the analysis, because they provide the driving force for physical and chemical interactions between the fluid and the solid phase – leading to trapping and safe storage.

 

About Professor Ronny Pini

Ronny Pini is a professor of Multiphase Systems at Imperial College London. He has over 15 years of experience in the study of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies, and has worked on both carbon capture processes as well as subsurface carbon dioxide storage processes.

In his laboratory, advanced experimentation is deployed across a range of scales, including imaging-augmented experimentation, to study flow, transport, phase equilibria and reactions in porous media. These activities are complemented by mathematical modelling and computation across scales – from pore-scale models to process design and optimisation. Current applications of interest include carbon dioxide storage in saline aquifers, carbon dioxide capture from flue gas, Direct Air Capture, methane abatement, and hydrogen purification.