Adding adsorption to a geothermal simulator

Abstract

Physical adsorption of steam has increasingly become recognized as an important storage mechanism in vapor dominated geothermal reservoirs. A method has been developed which allows the effects of adsorption to be modeled using TETRAD, a commercially available geothermal simulator. The method consists of replacing the standard steam table with a new steam table which has been derived to include adsorptive effects. The TETRAD simulator, when run with the pseudo steam table, approximately matches the pressure, production, and saturation behavior of a desorbing geothermal system. Adsorption can be described as the existence of an immobile layer of liquid on the surfaces within a porous medium. The presence of an adsorbed liquid water layer in rocks has been shown experimentally to cause the vapor pressure of steam to be lower than its flat surface vapor pressure for a particular The pseudo steam table accounts for this vapor pressure lowering effect. A test run was made with TETRAD using the pseudo steam table and a low porosity, low permeability reservoir matrix. This test run was compared to an equivalent run made with Stanford Geothermal Program's simulator, ADSORB. The program ADSORB is a one dimensional simulator which has adsorption effects built into its difference equations. The comparison of these runs shows that the pseudo steam table allows TETRAD to match the behavior of the ADSORB simulator. Injection was not investigated in this study. A convenient method of modeling adsorption with TETRAD is to use standard steam tables while allowing for the vapor pressure lowering effect of adsorption. This will require modifications of the equations in the code that describe the partial pressure of the steam phase