Minimizing Reservoir Damage during CO2 Injection

In subsurface CO2 injection for climate change mitigation, the underground formation can be damaged by over-injecting at high pressures and stresses. This can be either from constricting flow due to pore-scale damage, or in worst case scenarios, stresses could potentially open unforeseen fracture networks. The ruptures could cause greater environmental impacts such as induced seismicity or large scale leakage. However, engineers are also constrained by economic costs of time and resources to inject a large volume of carbon gases.

This challenging problem can be reformulated abstractly as a multiscale-PDE constrained optimal control minimization. A key quantity is the "damage functional" that measures how much damage the reservoir experiences over a certain region such as the cap rock or near wellbore. Given pressure and displacements fields, and injection quantity over a space of admissible injection scenarios, the idea is to minimize the damage functional. This is constrained by the fluid flow and subsurface deformation e.g. Darcy and Biot laws. Further complicating matters is that the coefficients in the PDE are often multiscale; combined with the nonlinear nature of the problem, analysis and simulation is exceedingly complex.

This PhD studentship aims to 1) derive realistic damage functionals from fundamental damage mechanisms and 2) develop efficient multiscale techniques to determine optimal injection scenarios to minimize possible reservoir damage. For this project, persons with experience with numerical methods as well as ability to program in MATLAB or other programming languages would be at an advantage. This project will also include possible linkages and training with industrial partner’s reservoir simulation software Petrel and related modules. In addition, this project will have considerable interaction with the GeoEnergy Research Centre (GERC) and British Geological Survey (BGS).


About the Energy Research Accelerator
The Energy Research Accelerator (ERA) is a cross-disciplinary energy innovation hub which brings together capital assets, data and intellectual leadership to foster collaboration between academia and business to accelerate the development of solutions to the global energy challenge. It will provide new buildings and cutting-edge demonstrators, develop highly skilled people and jobs, as well as new products and services to ultimately transform the UK’s energy sector. Building on existing programmes and academic expertise across the partnership, universities within ERA have committed over £2m for doctoral students as a critical part of the ERA skills agenda.
Delivered through Innovate UK, the government has committed an initial capital investment of £60m, and ERA has secured private sector co-investment of £120m. ERA’s initial priorities of Geo-Energy Systems, Integrated Energy Systems and Thermal Energy will help deliver the new technologies and behaviours that will open the avenues for its future development and demonstrate the transformative effect ERA can have across the energy spectrum.

Through the Midlands Energy Consortium (MEC), Midlands’ universities have already worked closely to deliver essential research and postgraduate skills - clustering energy research and development to deliver technologies capable of enabling the UK’s transition to a low-carbon economy. ERA is the next step along that journey to become a major hub for energy talent.

ERA is a key programme within Midlands Innovation - a consortium of research intensive universities which has the overall aim of harnessing the Midlands’ combined research excellence and industry expertise to play a critical role in tackling some of the biggest challenges facing the UK.

Summary: UK/EU students - Tuition Fees paid, and full Stipend at the RCUK rate, which is £14,296 per annum for 2016/17. There will also be some support available for you to claim for limited conference attendance. The scholarship length will be 3.5 years and the successful applicant will be part of the Energy Research Accelerator at the University of Nottingham (http://www.era.ac.uk/).