Pore-Level Modeling of Carbon Dioxide Sequestration in Oil Fields: A study of viscous and buoyancy forces

Underground injection of carbon dioxide for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) is a common practice in the oil and gas industry and has often been cited as a proven method of sequestering CO2 (US DOE, 1999). Of all sequestration methods, this is probably the best understood, as carbon dioxide has been used in the oil industry for many years. Additionally, most oil fields have been relatively well characterized geologically, and often have impermeable layers above them, which will act as traps for sequestered CO2. Miscible CO2 flooding is particularly favorable for both EOR and sequestration because the absence of capillary forces increases the efficiency of the displacement. Of course, the goals of enhanced oil recovery and CO2 sequestration are not the same, so a flooding process optimized for sequestration will be somewhat different than one for oil recovery.