Analysis Of The Use Of Superposition For Analytic Models Of CO2 Injection Into Reservoirs With Multiple Injection Sites

Abstract

Large scale CCS is crucial to reduce the cost associated with minimizing climate change. Energy system models should thus include CCS at regional or global scale with a proper evaluation of pressure limitations and injectivity, which are currently ignored. To this aim, the use of simplified analytical solutions is highly useful because they provide fast evaluation of pressure and plume evolution without the computational costs of the numerical models. Application of these solutions to assess storage capacity has been extended to cases of multiple well injection. In these cases, the pressure build-up is evaluated as the superposition of the analytical solutions for pressure associated with each individual well. In this study we investigate the validity of the superposition procedure, given the non-linearity of the multiphase flow. We quantify the error associated with the application of superposition to estimate reservoir pressurisation in different scenarios of.multi-site CO2 injection in a large regional aquifer. We find that the error associated with the adoption of this procedure increases with time and with the number of wells in proportion to the area invaded by CO2 in the reservoir.