Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Depleted natural gas reservoirs are a promising target for Carbon Sequestration with Enhanced Gas Recovery (CSEGR). The focus of this study is on evaluating the importance of Joule-Thomson cooling during CO2 injection into depleted natural gas reservoirs. Joule-Thomson cooling is the adiabatic cooling that accompanies the expansion of a real gas. If Joule-Thomson cooling were extreme, injectivity and formation permeability could be altered by the freezing of residual water, formation of hydrates, and fracturing due to thermal stresses. The TOUGH2/EOS7C module for CO2-CH4-H2O mixtures is used as the simulation analysis tool. For verification of EOS7C, the classic Joule-Thomson expansion experiment is modeled for pure CO2 resulting in Joule-Thomson coefficients in agreement with standard references to within 5-7 percent. For demonstration purposes, CO2 injection at constant pressure and with a large pressure drop (~;50 bars) is presented in order to show that cooling by more than 20oC can occur by this effect. Two more-realistic constant-rate injection cases show that for typical systems in the Sacramento Valley, California, the Joule-Thomson cooling effect is minimal. This simulation study shows that for constant-rate injections into high-permeability reservoirs, the Joule-Thomson cooling effect is not expected to create significant problems for CSEGR.