Simulation of Water Evaporation and Salt Precipitation during Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage in Aquifer

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that has the most effect in the phenomenon of global warming. Carbon dioxide capture and storage are considered to be a top choice for reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Saline aquifers have high potential compared with other storage options, such as, depleted oil and gas reservoirs to store Carbon dioxide. In the last decade, there has been a great interest in the study of storing Carbon dioxide in the saline aquifers. Among the different mechanisms, Carbon dioxide can traped in the aquifer by dissolving in water. Water evaporation is a process that leads to salt deposition in the surrounding area of the injection well that reduces the porosity, damages the reservoir permeability near the wellbore and reduces the well injectivity. Modeling and the simulation have been performed by MATLAB R2013a software to study the effect of Carbon dioxide injection on the aquifer properties. A comparison between the results and those obtained using Zeidouni et al. shows that the proposed model has the same values for porosity change and permeability reduction. The proposed model with an average relative deviation about %7 is able to accurately predict the aquifer properties during CO2 gas injection.