Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

To secure a stable supply of petroleum gas, underground storage caverns for liquified petroleum gas (LPG) are commonly used in many countries worldwide. Storing LPG in underground caverns requires that the surrounding rock mass remain saturated with groundwater and that the water pressure be higher than the liquid pressure inside the cavern. In previous studies, gas containment criteria for underground gas storage based on hydraulic gradient and pressure have been discussed, but these studies do not consider the physicochemical characteristics and behavior of LPG such as vaporization and dissolution in groundwater. Therefore, while these studies are very useful for designing storage caverns, they do not provide better understanding of the either the environmental effects of gas contamination or the behavior of vaporized LPG. In this study, we have performed three-phase fluid flow simulations of gas leakage from underground LPG storage caverns, using the multiphase multicomponent nonisothermal simulator TMVOC (Pruess and Battistelli, 2002), which is capable of solving the three-phase nonisothermal flow of water, gas, and a multicomponent mixture of volatile organic chemicals (VOCs) in multidimensional heterogeneous porous media. A two-dimensional cross-sectional model resembling an actual underground LPG facility in Japan was developed, and gas leakage phenomena were simulated for three different permeability models: (1) a homogeneous model, (2) a single-fault model, and (3) a heterogeneous model. In addition, the behavior of stored LPG was studied for the special case of a water curtain suddenly losing its function because of operational problems, or because of long-term effects such as clogging of boreholes. The results of the study indicate the following: (1) The water curtain system is a very powerful means for preventing gas leakage from underground storage facilities. By operating with appropriate pressure and layout, gas containment can be ensured. (2) However, in highly heterogeneous media such as fractured rock and fault zones, local flow paths within which the gas containment criterion is not satisfied could be formed. To eliminate such zones, treatments such as pre/post grouting or an additional installment of water-curtain boreholes are essential. (3) Along highly conductive features such as faults, even partially saturated zones possess certain effects that can retard or prevent gas leakage, while a fully unsaturated fault connected to the storage cavern can quickly cause a gas blowout. This possibility strongly suggests that ensuring water saturation of the rock surrounding the cavern is a very important requirement. (4) Even if an accident should suddenly impair the water curtain, the gas plume does not quickly penetrate the ground surface. In these simulations, the plume takes several months to reach the ground surface.