Enhanced gas recovery by carbon dioxide sequestration: elucidating the physics of mixing between carbon dioxide and methane in consolidated porous media

Enhanced Gas Recovery (EGR) by re-injecting CO2 into producing natural gas reservoirs is considered a promising technology to both sequester CO2 and improve recovery of natural gas. The work in this thesis provides a better understanding of the factors governing supercritical CO2 and CH4 mixing in porous media. The high-quality dispersion data produced can be reliably described in terms of a general correlation that can be readily implemented into EGR reservoir simulations. The correlation accounts for the effects of multiple phenomena on in-situ mixing, including pressure, temperature, gas composition, interstitial velocity, rock tortuosity, dispersivity, and residual water saturation.