Jun. Prof. Maartje Boon, a research member of SFB 1313 and SimTech, will give her inaugural lecture on June 12. Her lecture will be part of the SFB1313 "Coupled Free Flow - Porous Medium Systems" Workshop and the SimTech Colloquium and will be followed by a Get-together in the SimTech Foyer (Pfaffenwaldring 5, 70569 Stuttgart).
Title: "Subsurface Gas Storage in Porous Reservoirs: A Pathway to Sustainable Energy?"
Date: 12 June 2024
Time: 6 pm CET
Place: Hörsaal V 7.01, Pfaffenwaldring 7, 70569 Stuttgart.
Abstract
Large-scale subsurface gas storage in porous reservoirs has the potential to be an important component of a sustainable energy future. Geological carbon dioxide storage can mitigate CO2 emissions, while underground energy storage, particularly in the form of hydrogen, offers a potential solution for balancing renewable energy production and demand. While the concept of storing gases in subsurface reservoirs is not new — natural gas has been safely stored underground for decades — the distinct physiochemical properties of methane, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen could lead to very different behavior in the subsurface.
Reservoir simulation is a valuable tool for investigating the feasibility of large-scale subsurface gas storage in porous reservoirs. However, to obtain meaningful results, it is crucial that the input parameters accurately capture the behavior of the gas-brine-rock system, including the impact of small-scale rock heterogeneity.
In this lecture, I will look at the differences between methane, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen storage, demonstrate how multi-phase flow in heterogeneous porous rock can be experimentally visualized and characterized from the pore- to the core-scale, and show how meaningful input parameters for reservoir simulators can be derived by integrating these experimental findings with numerical and analytical modeling techniques.
About Maartje Boon
Maartje Boon is a new junior professor in the Institute of Applied Mechanics at the University of Stuttgart working on Porous Media. She holds an MSc in Hydrogeology from Utrecht University and obtained her PhD in Petroleum Engineering from Imperial College London where she worked on reactive transport with application for geological carbon sequestration. From 2017-2021, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Energy Resources Engineering department, focusing on the impact of rock-structure heterogeneity on multi-phase flow properties and its implications for geological carbon sequestration. In 2021, she started a postdoc position at the Geoscience Engineering department at TU Delft, where she worked on Underground Hydrogen Storage in porous media, characterizing hydrogen transport from the pore- to the field scale.