Numerical Modeling of Steam Injection Into Saturated Porous Media

Abstract

The Steam Enhanced Extraction (SEE) process is being considered for removal of volatile organic contaminants contained in the fractured basalt rocks which lie above the Snake River aquifer at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL). In this work the computer code M2NOTS (Multiphase Multi-component Non-isothermal Organic Transport Simulator) was used to simulate an experiment which tracked the movement of a steam condensation front through glass blocks separated by glass beads. The experiment was designed to represent steam injection into highly fractured basalt. For grid spacing equal to the block size heat transfer from the fractures to the blocks was severely under predicted, resulting in an over prediction of the condensation front velocity. A method was developed to accurately simulate the propagation of a steam condensation front through a fractured porous media using grid spacing equal to the block dimension. The method accounts for non-equilibrium conduction within a grid node, allowing the grid spacing to be increased well beyond the local equilibrium restriction. Simulation results compare well with the experimental results, validating the non-equilibrium model, and also indicating that M2NOTs can be effectively used to model the steam enhanced extraction process in fractured porous media.