Modelling of CO₂ storage in geological formations with DuMu^x, a free-open-source numerical framework. A possible tool to assess geological storage of carbon dioxide in Romania

¹ Dept. of Applied Geology, Geoscience Centre of the University of Göttingen, Goldschmidtstr. 3, 37077, Göttingen, Germany
² Faculty of Hydrotechnics, Technical University of Civil Engineering Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania

^* Corresponding author: alexandru.tatomir@geo.uni-goettingen.de

Abstract

Geological storage of carbon dioxide represents a viable solution to reduce the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Romania has initiatives to build a large-scale integrated CO₂ capture and storage demonstration project and find suitable on-shore and off-shore CO₂ storage locations. Numerical simulators are essential tools helping the design process. These simulators are required to be capable to represent the complex thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical and biological phenomena accompanying the geological CO₂ storage such as, multi-phase flow, compositional effects due to dissolution of CO₂ into the brine, non-isothermal effects due to cold CO₂ injection, geomechanical effects, mineralization at the reservoir-scale. These processes can be simulated accurately and efficiently with DuMu^x (www.dumux.org), a free- and open-source simulator. This article presents and reviews briefly these mathematical and numerical models.