Bell Creek Test Site Simulation Report, Update 5
The PCOR Partnership has been working with Denbury Resources Inc. in the Bell Creek Field to evaluate the effectiveness of large-scale CO2 injection for CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and study the long-term CO2 storage potential within the field. As part of the PCOR Partnerships adaptive management approach to developing the CO2 storage program, modeling and numerical simulation activities continue toward the goal of providing a comprehensive assessment of associated CO2 storage behavior. This goal, while not a new objective at Bell Creek Field, has been guiding recent efforts discussed in this report (work completed since August 2015). The overarching themes for the research discussed in this report include 1) increasing our understanding of the subsurface of Bell Creek Field through the acquisition of new data and 2) modeling and simulation activities to achieve predictions of fluid flow, pressure response, oil sweep and CO2 storage efficiency, and determining the long-term fate of injected CO2. More specifically, discussion from this reporting period includes the 1) acquisition of new geologic characterization data, including pulsed-neutron logs and surface seismic data, to reduce uncertainty in model construction; 2) modeling of the reservoir and shallow subsurface aquifers, both within and surrounding the field, to provide the basis for numerical simulations of CO2 injection; 3) development of a pressure, volume, and temperature model (to be applied in compositional simulations) to predict the miscibility behavior of the system with varying injection gas compositions (i.e., recycled gas injection, CO2 with varying amounts of impurities); 4) investigation of the effects of recycled gas injection on EOR and CO2 storage performance; 5) history-matching of reservoir models; and 6) running of predictive simulations to aid in monitoring long-term behaviorView/Download Document