(Acknowledgment: This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 846775)

About this Project

EU H2020 MSCA - Carbon fracturing and storage in shale with wellbore infrastructure monitoring (2019 - 2022). As the EU pushes ahead with its energy and climate agenda, it will need a broad range of cleaner energy sources including natural gas, if it is to retain its leading position in emission reductions in a carbon-constrained world. Europe has enough gas to meet around half of its own demand for another 25 years. The public concerns of geological disaster, underground pollution, contaminated water and damage to ecosystems are the major obstacles to the shale gas revolution in Europe. Therefore, this fellowship aims to relieve the energy security and carbon emission issues in Europe by introducing a new environmental-friendly technique for shale gas exploitation combined with carbon storage process, named as pure CO2 Fracturing and Storage in Shale technique, from the fundamental science of hybrid engineering. The direct impact from this new technique estimated as for a single typical shale gas well, 30000 tons of freshwater will be saved and 150 tons of underground polluting chemicals will be prevented and a minimum of 15000 tons of CO2 will be embedded. Furthermore, a toolkit and platform to enable the integration of resiliency-improving monitoring and forecasting wellbore infrastructure will be developed by combining traditional laboratory and field studies, data mining, machine learning, uncertainty quantification and reliability-based design so to utilize the data to its full potential.

 

Research highlight:

Incipient Motion Behavior of the Settled Particles in Supercritical CO2:

The current research performed visualization experiments of particle-Supercritical CO2 two-phase flow. The critical particle restarting pump rate empirical formula in supercritical CO2 (SC-CO2 has been fitted based on the experimental results. Further numerical analysis indicated that the cohesive force was zero and Magnus Force was significant in SC-CO2, namely that particle in SC-CO2 was easy to restart based on the Shields number and force analyses.