PESA VIC/TAS branch is actively working on its schedule of meetings and will bring some in-house events to the membership ASAP. Meanwhile, some of the branch membership are able to access meetings of our sister geoscience societies in Melbourne. On Friday 10th October, a few PESA Victorians attended the SPE lunchtime talk given by the SPE Distinguished Lecturer Mike Byrne, of Elemental Energies. Mike spoke on the topic of CO2 injection well design with the subtitle “The same, but different”. He discussed challenges of managing reservoir pressure and temperature in some depleted gas wells, and of geochemical and metallurgical reactivity from the mildly-acidic mixture of formation water and injected CO2 (and important trace contaminants such as SOx and NOx). His most spectacular “party trick” was to demonstrate the challenge of fines migration by platy clays such as kaolinite, using a sheaf of A4 paper thrown into the wind. CO2 injection can result in very high gas velocities (up to 70 m/sec) into depleted reservoirs and this can easily stir-up the platy “books” of Kaolinite. He doesn’t want to be known as “the man who throws paper”, but it was nonetheless an impressive demonstration of how far the fines spread and how they act to block permeable channels by forming platy arrays across pore throats.
The venue was cleaned-up by helpful SPE volunteers – much more easily than a subsurface clean-up could be managed. Mike concluded that the “sameness” of CO2 well design should not blind us to the significant differences from Petroleum wells. There was a healthy Q&A session and Mike answered a wide variety of questions, further illustrating the subtleties and complexities of CO2 well design and management.
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