2025 Energy HPC Conference

Reactive Transport Simulation in Porous Media and Implications for CCS

Abstract: Characterizing the chemical interaction of reactive fluids and the subsurface mineral framework is an essential, but often neglected, component of assessing risk in hydrological, geological, and engineering applications such as enhanced oil recovery (EoR), carbon capture and storage (CCS), and geological hydrogen storage. Reactive transport simulations model the dynamics of fluid flow, solute transport, and chemical interactions in a porous media to address environmental, energy, and resource management challenges. Due to the complexity of the geochemistry and large span of relevant time scales, available simulation tools often grossly simplify the models by solving the flow-transport-reaction equations for reduced systems in terms of chemical, compositional, and spatial representations. Here, we present a novel and scalable simulation framework to directly model the full chemical interaction between fluid and rock, the evolution of the rock mineralogy and porosity, and the complex chemistry of the effluent in the pore-scale of a digitized rock sample. Using the HPC resources available at bp, we demonstrate the capabilities of our software on several rocks and discuss the implications for risk management of CCS projects.

Authors: Jeremy First (bp), Yuliana Zapata (bp), and Srivatsa Mudumba-Ramana (bp/Numerical Algorithms Group)