Estimating CO2 Fluxes Along Leaky Wellbores

SPE Journal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (02) ◽  
pp. 227-238 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qing Tao ◽  
Dean A. Checkai ◽  
Nicolas J. Huerta ◽  
Steven L. Bryant

Summary Large-scale geological storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) is likely to bring CO2 plumes into contact with a large number of existing wellbores. The flux of CO2 along a leaking wellbore requires a model of fluid properties and of transport along the leakage pathway. Knowing the range of effective permeability of faulty cement is essential for estimating the risk of CO2 leakage. The central premise of this paper is that the leakage pathway in wells that exhibit sustained casing pressure (SCP) is analogous to the rate-limiting part of the leakage pathway in any wellbore that CO2 might encounter. Thus, field observations of SCP can be used to estimate transport properties of a CO2-leakage pathway. Uncertainty in the estimate can be reduced by accounting for constraints from well-construction geometry and from physical considerations. We then describe a simple CO2-leakage model. The model accounts for variation in CO2 properties along the leakage path and allows the path to terminate in an unconfined (constant-pressure) exit. The latter assumption provides a worst-case leakage flux. By use of pathway permeabilities consistent with observations in SCP wells, we obtain a range of CO2 fluxes for the cases of buoyancy-driven (post-injection) and pressure-driven (during injection) leakage. Assuming the frequency distribution is representative of SCP wells, we observe that in leakage pathways corresponding to the slow but nonnegligible buildup of casing pressure (several psi/D), the effective permeability of the leakage path is in the range of microdarcies to hundreds of microdarcies, and the corresponding CO2 fluxes are comparable with naturally occurring background fluxes observed at the ground surface. In pathways corresponding to intermediate and fast buildup rate of casing pressure (tens to hundreds of psi/D), the effective permeability is in the range of tenths to tens of millidarcies, and the CO2 fluxes are comparable with surface flux measurements at the Illinois basin and at the natural seep at Crystal Geyser (Utah). In pathways corresponding to very fast buildup rate (thousands of psi/D), the effective permeability is from tens to hundreds of millidarcies and the CO2 fluxes are up to three orders of magnitude higher than those measured at Crystal Geyser.

Author(s):  
Neetu Prasad ◽  
Graeme King ◽  
Arfeen Najeeb

Abstract Thermally insulated hot buried pipelines pose a unique set of challenges. This paper discusses those challenges and how they were met during design and construction of the 150 km long Husky LLB Direct Pipeline, the longest thermally insulated oil pipeline in Canada. Thermal insulation materials are soft and can be easily damaged during construction and backfilling, and by large restraining forces at bends when the pipeline is operating at high temperatures. The large temperature difference between pipeline installation temperature and maximum operating temperature leads to large axial compressive forces that can cause movement at bends, crush insulation, increase temperatures at ground surface, cause loss of restraint, and in the worst case, lead to upheaval buckling and loss of containment. Special design and construction features to deal with these challenges, including insulation specifications, insulation of pipe bends, pipeline pre-straining, long radius bends, deeper burial, and pipeline roping, were therefore necessary. After pipe has been insulated with polyurethane foam it cannot be bent in standard field bending machines used for uninsulated pipes because the foam is too soft. The induction bends and cold bends that are shop insulated after bending are expensive. The Project minimized the number of these expensive insulated bends by using an engineered ditch bottom profile. This meant that shop bends were only needed to reduce excavation depth at sharp changes in ground surface elevation where the roped profile required excessive grading. Care was therefore necessary in the selection and development of specifications for the insulation system and shop fabricated bends, and to design and construct a ditch profile to minimize forces on the insulation and control upheaval buckling. Close co-ordination with vendors and the construction contractor was crucial for a successful and timely completion.


2010 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 3393-3451 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Iudicone ◽  
I. Stendardo ◽  
O. Aumont ◽  
K. B. Rodgers ◽  
G. Madec ◽  
...  

Abstract. A watermass-based framework is presented for a quantitative understanding of the processes controlling the cycling of carbon in the Southern Ocean. The approach is developed using a model simulation of the global carbon transports within the ocean and with the atmosphere. It is shown how the watermass framework sheds light on the interplay between biology, air-sea gas exchange, and internal ocean transport including diapycnal processes, and the way in which this interplay controls the large-scale ocean-atmosphere carbon exchange. The simulated pre-industrial regional patterns of DIC distribution and the global distribution of the pre-industrial air-sea CO2 fluxes compare well with other model results and with results from an ocean inversion method. The main differences are found in the Southern Ocean where the model presents a stronger CO2 outgassing south of the polar front, a result of the upwelling of DIC-rich deep waters into the surface layer. North of the subantarctic front the typical temperature-driven solubility effect produces a net ingassing of CO2. The biological controls on surface CO2 fluxes through primary production is generally smaller than the temperature effect on solubility. Novel to this study is also a Lagrangian trajectory analysis of the meridional transport of DIC. The analysis allows to evaluate the contribution of separate branches of the global thermohaline circulation (identified by watermasses) to the vertical distribution of DIC throughout the Southern Ocean and towards the global ocean. The most important new result is that the overturning associated with Subantarctic Mode Waters sustains a northward net transport of DIC (15.7×107 mol/s across 30° S). This new finding, which has also relevant implications on the prediction of anthropogenic carbon redistribution, results from the specific mechanism of SAMW formation and its source waters whose consequences on tracer transports are analyzed for the first time in this study.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaclyn Marjorie Smith ◽  
Melvin Lathara ◽  
Hollis Wright ◽  
Brian Hill ◽  
Nalini Ganapati ◽  
...  

Abstract Background The affordability of next-generation genomic sequencing and the improvement of medical data management have contributed largely to the evolution of biological analysis from both a clinical and research perspective. Precision medicine is a response to these advancements that places individuals into better-defined subsets based on shared clinical and genetic features. The identification of personalized diagnosis and treatment options is dependent on the ability to draw insights from large-scale, multi-modal analysis of biomedical datasets. Driven by a real use case, we premise that platforms that support precision medicine analysis should maintain data in their optimal data stores, should support distributed storage and query mechanisms, and should scale as more samples are added to the system. Results We extended a genomics-based columnar data store, GenomicsDB, for ease of use within a distributed analytics platform for clinical and genomic data integration, known as the ODA framework. The framework supports interaction from an i2b2 plugin as well as a notebook environment. We show that the ODA framework exhibits worst-case linear scaling for array size (storage), import time (data construction), and query time for an increasing number of samples. We go on to show worst-case linear time for both import of clinical data and aggregate query execution time within a distributed environment. Conclusions This work highlights the integration of a distributed genomic database with a distributed compute environment to support scalable and efficient precision medicine queries from a HIPAA-compliant, cohort system in a real-world setting. The ODA framework is currently deployed in production to support precision medicine exploration and analysis from clinicians and researchers at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.


2015 ◽  
Vol 138 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Austin-Breneman ◽  
Bo Yang Yu ◽  
Maria C. Yang

During the early stage design of large-scale engineering systems, design teams are challenged to balance a complex set of considerations. The established structured approaches for optimizing complex system designs offer strategies for achieving optimal solutions, but in practice suboptimal system-level results are often reached due to factors such as satisficing, ill-defined problems, or other project constraints. Twelve subsystem and system-level practitioners at a large aerospace organization were interviewed to understand the ways in which they integrate subsystems in their own work. Responses showed subsystem team members often presented conservative, worst-case scenarios to other subsystems when negotiating a tradeoff as a way of hedging against their own future needs. This practice of biased information passing, referred to informally by the practitioners as adding “margins,” is modeled in this paper with a series of optimization simulations. Three “bias” conditions were tested: no bias, a constant bias, and a bias which decreases with time. Results from the simulations show that biased information passing negatively affects both the number of iterations needed and the Pareto optimality of system-level solutions. Results are also compared to the interview responses and highlight several themes with respect to complex system design practice.


2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (8) ◽  
pp. 2619-2633 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Feng ◽  
P. I. Palmer ◽  
H. Bösch ◽  
S. Dance

Abstract. We have developed an ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) to estimate 8-day regional surface fluxes of CO2 from space-borne CO2 dry-air mole fraction observations (XCO2) and evaluate the approach using a series of synthetic experiments, in preparation for data from the NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO). The 32-day duty cycle of OCO alternates every 16 days between nadir and glint measurements of backscattered solar radiation at short-wave infrared wavelengths. The EnKF uses an ensemble of states to represent the error covariances to estimate 8-day CO2 surface fluxes over 144 geographical regions. We use a 12×8-day lag window, recognising that XCO2 measurements include surface flux information from prior time windows. The observation operator that relates surface CO2 fluxes to atmospheric distributions of XCO2 includes: a) the GEOS-Chem transport model that relates surface fluxes to global 3-D distributions of CO2 concentrations, which are sampled at the time and location of OCO measurements that are cloud-free and have aerosol optical depths <0.3; and b) scene-dependent averaging kernels that relate the CO2 profiles to XCO2, accounting for differences between nadir and glint measurements, and the associated scene-dependent observation errors. We show that OCO XCO2 measurements significantly reduce the uncertainties of surface CO2 flux estimates. Glint measurements are generally better at constraining ocean CO2 flux estimates. Nadir XCO2 measurements over the terrestrial tropics are sparse throughout the year because of either clouds or smoke. Glint measurements provide the most effective constraint for estimating tropical terrestrial CO2 fluxes by accurately sampling fresh continental outflow over neighbouring oceans. We also present results from sensitivity experiments that investigate how flux estimates change with 1) bias and unbiased errors, 2) alternative duty cycles, 3) measurement density and correlations, 4) the spatial resolution of estimated flux estimates, and 5) reducing the length of the lag window and the size of the ensemble. At the revision stage of this manuscript, the OCO instrument failed to reach its orbit after it was launched on 24 February 2009. The EnKF formulation presented here is also applicable to GOSAT measurements of CO2 and CH4.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-77
Author(s):  
Russell Lee ◽  
Jessica Maghakian ◽  
Mohammad Hajiesmaili ◽  
Jian Li ◽  
Ramesh Sitaraman ◽  
...  

This paper studies the online energy scheduling problem in a hybrid model where the cost of energy is proportional to both the volume and peak usage, and where energy can be either locally generated or drawn from the grid. Inspired by recent advances in online algorithms with Machine Learned (ML) advice, we develop parameterized deterministic and randomized algorithms for this problem such that the level of reliance on the advice can be adjusted by a trust parameter. We then analyze the performance of the proposed algorithms using two performance metrics: robustness that measures the competitive ratio as a function of the trust parameter when the advice is inaccurate, and consistency for competitive ratio when the advice is accurate. Since the competitive ratio is analyzed in two different regimes, we further investigate the Pareto optimality of the proposed algorithms. Our results show that the proposed deterministic algorithm is Pareto-optimal, in the sense that no other online deterministic algorithms can dominate the robustness and consistency of our algorithm. Furthermore, we show that the proposed randomized algorithm dominates the Pareto-optimal deterministic algorithm. Our large-scale empirical evaluations using real traces of energy demand, energy prices, and renewable energy generations highlight that the proposed algorithms outperform worst-case optimized algorithms and fully data-driven algorithms.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yogi Suardiwerianto ◽  
Sofyan Kurnianto ◽  
Adibtya Asyhari ◽  
Tubagus Muhamad Risky ◽  
Muhammad Fikky Hidayat ◽  
...  

&lt;p&gt;Transpiration is a key process in the terrestrial ecosystems linking water, carbon, and energy exchanges between the vegetation and the atmosphere. However, the understanding of transpiration rate, its spatiotemporal dynamics, and the controlling factors in tropical peatlands are still constrained by limited measurements. This study aims to investigate the transpiration rates at the stand level of Acacia plantation under different groundwater levels. The measurements were performed at two large-scale lysimeter plots with groundwater level of 40 and 80 cm below the ground surface. The transpiration rate was quantified based on sap flow measurements from 16 trees with different diameters at breast height using heat ratio method. The initial results indicate that the transpiration rate was closely correlated to the meteorological parameters, including atmospheric vapor pressure deficit and solar radiation. The two plots with different groundwater level regimes exhibit the same diurnal pattern of transpiration rate yet shows differences in their magnitude. The findings from this study will improve the understanding about relative contribution of transpiration to the total water balance under different groundwater levels. Further, an ongoing measurement of above and below-ground biomass growth and hydrological modeling work will advance the knowledge on plant-water interaction from this ecosystem.&lt;/p&gt;


Geosciences ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 480
Author(s):  
Glenda Abate ◽  
Simone Bramante ◽  
Maria Rossella Massimino

Several urban areas in the Mediterranean have already been subjected to seismic microzonation studies aimed at determining the acceleration expected on the ground surface, therefore mitigating the associated seismic risks. These studies have been generally related to free-field conditions. The present paper shows innovative seismic microzonation maps based on a large-scale estimate of soil-structure interaction (SSI) effects on design accelerations for some areas characterized by a high seismic risk in Catania, Italy. The proposed procedure combined: (1) geotechnical characteristics; (2) building features; and (3) 1-D seismic response analyses in free-field conditions. The seismic hazard and site effects were evaluated using artificial inputs and inputs recorded recently in Catania. Structural fundamental periods and related spectral accelerations, considering both the fixed-base building configuration and flexible-base configuration, were mapped in the Google My Maps environment. These results showed that SSI often had a beneficial effect, but sometimes it had detrimental effects, especially for some masonry buildings. These maps provided important information for planning the seismic retrofitting of investigated buildings, which were based on more detailed analyses of SSI and the developed maps requiring them.


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