India - Fracture and Flow in Porous Media: Application in geothermal installation, hydrocarbon production and CO2 storage

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Geothermal energy is one of the best sources of clean energy on earth and extensive use of natural gas (instead of petroleum) can reduce carbon emission a lot. Also a success in CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) activities will lead toward a cleaner enviro nment. While for geothermal installation and gas production we need to drill through hard and hot porous rock, enormous amount of CO2 can be injected in empty underground reservoirs for long term storage. During fluid injection in such scenarios cracks op en up and existing fractures grow in porous reservoirs due to fluid pressure and stress imbalance and sometimes growth of fractures results in leakage or well-collapse, which are major safety issues. It is important therefore to be able to predict fractur e and flow behavior in disordered porous media. We propose to combine discrete particle modelling (pore scale), stochastic modelling (mesoscopic scale) and discrete element modelling (reservoir scale) in order to monitor and study fracture propagation and fluid flow phenomena in porous media. The findings from these simulations will be calibrated against controlled laboratory experiments on core samples and artificial systems. The main goal of this project is to achieve control on the fracturing process and fluid flow dynamics in porous media through increasing our fundamental knowledge of these processes - which can in turn improve the safety as well as efficiency of operations during drilling and fluid injection. Geothermal energy and CCS have substant ial potentials both in Norway and India, and an additional benefit of the project results is increased production of hydrocarbons. This project has been developed from the ongoing research collaboration (Appendix 1) between Norwegian and Indian institutio ns through INDNOR preproject 2011 funded by The Research Council of Norway (grant no 205101/H30).