Joint Colloquium: Herbert E Huppert -- Fluid modelling of carbon dioxide sequestration

If you’re planning to go to Friday’s joint colloquium at UNSW and can either offer space
in your car or would like to share a ride, please let me
know:[email protected].  If you want to go early enough to join the Speaker for
lunch, please meet me at the watchtower just inside the city Road entrance at 12:15
p.m.  (unless someone volunteers their car we need to meet at a place where a taxi can
find us).  I can also arrange transport for anyone wishing to go to the algebra seminar
and then across to the colloquium.  

Speaker: Prof.  Herbert E Huppert, (DAMTP, Cambridge) 

Title: Fluid modelling of carbon dioxide sequestration.  

Date: Friday, 22 August 2008 Time: 2:00 pm Venue: RC-4082, The Red Centre, UNSW.  Meet
for lunch at 1 p.m.  outside the Eastern entrance to the Red-Centre by the big fig.  

Abstract: 

Current global anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are approximately 27 Gigatonnes
annually.  The influence of this green-house gas on climate has raised concern.  A means
of reducing environmental damage is to store carbon dioxide somewhere until well past
the end of the fossil fuel era.  Storage by injection of liquid, or supercritical,
carbon dioxide into porous reservoir rocks, such as depleted oil and gas fields and
regional saline aquifers, is being considered.  The presentation will discuss the rate
and form of propagation to be expected.  It builds on theoretical and experimental
investigations of input of liquid of one viscosity and density from a point source above
an impermeable boundary, either horizontal or slanted, into a heterogeneous porous
medium saturated with liquid of different viscosity and density.  Key predictions are:
1) for constant supply the radius of carbon dioxide ponding below a horizontal
impermeable barrier will increase as the square root of time; 2) at constant supply rate
the central thickness of the carbon dioxide pond is invariant with time; 3) the radius
is proportional to the quarter power of input flux and permeability; 4) the effect of a
slope is unnoticed until a time scale which varies between months and years for typical
natural parameters; and 5) it is possible to use measurements of radius to estimate
volume stored.  In the Sleipner natural gas field, carbon dioxide has been injected at a
rate of ~ 1 Mt/yr since 1996.  We will briefly show how to apply our results to
interpret these field observations.