Evolution of carbon isotope signatures during reactive transport of hydrocarbons in heterogeneous aquifers

Höyng, Dominik; Prommer, Henning; Blum, Philipp; Grathwohl, Peter; D'Affonseca, Fernando Mazo

doi:10.1016/j.jconhyd.2014.12.005

Cited by 17 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 64 publications

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“…We would disagree that there have been no studies on how low‐ K zones affect conservative and reactive transport. There have been ample studies on diffusion in and out of “clay lenses” [e.g., Chapman and Parker , ; Chapman et al ., ; Guswa and Freyberg , ], and a few studies using aquifer analogs [e.g., Bayer et al ., ; Höyng et al ., ]. Low‐ K environments are more frequent in contamination‐related consultancy practice than in hydrogeological research studies, because we tend to pick nice productive aquifers for our research whereas contaminations occurred where there was the corresponding industry.…”

Section: Postscript: Comments On the Other Papers In The Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Debates—Stochastic subsurface hydrology from theory to practice: Does stochastic subsurface hydrology help solving practical problems of contaminant hydrogeology?

Cirpka

Valocchi

2016

Water Resources Research

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While stochastic subsurface hydrology has been tremendously successful in understanding how the spatial variability of hydraulic conductivity affects conservative solute transport in idealized settings, it has gained little impact in practice. This is the case because typical assumptions needed for the derivation of analytical expressions are too restrictive for practical applications and often geologically implausible, small‐scale variation of hydraulic conductivity is by far not the only cause of uncertainty when considering the fate and remediation of pollutants, and the research community has not developed enough methods that can directly be used by practitioners. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose putting more emphasis on providing easy‐to‐use tools to generate realistic realizations of subsurface properties that are conditioned on all data measured at a site, extending the focus from hydraulic conductivity only to all parameters and processes relevant for reactive transport, making use of self‐organizing principles of reactive transport to conceptually simplify the problem, and addressing conceptual uncertainty by stochastic methods.

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Section: Postscript: Comments On the Other Papers In The Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

Debates—Stochastic subsurface hydrology from theory to practice: Does stochastic subsurface hydrology help solving practical problems of contaminant hydrogeology?

Cirpka

Valocchi

2016

Water Resources Research

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“…Both case studies were mainly motivated from hydrogeology: the young Rhine gravels host among the most productive aquifers in central Europe, and the Brazilian Pirambóia formation belongs to those sequences that store the most important groundwater reservoir in South America, the Guarani Aquifer system (GAS). The original descriptions of highly resolved hydraulic and hydrochemical heterogeneity and earlier interpolated blocks hence served as aquifer analogs in several previous groundwater modelling and model inversion studies 17 , 19 , 20 , 22 , 28 , 42 , 43 . For instance, Maji and Sudicky 42 implemented the Herten analog in a numerical flow and transport model with decimetre-grid resolution to examine the solution of dense nonaqueous phase liquids (DNAPL) in sedimentary aquifers.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

High resolution multi-facies realizations of sedimentary reservoir and aquifer analogs

et al. 2015

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Geological structures are by nature inaccessible to direct observation. This can cause difficulties in applications where a spatially explicit representation of such structures is required, in particular when modelling fluid migration in geological formations. An increasing trend in recent years has been to use analogs to palliate this lack of knowledge, i.e., exploiting the spatial information from sites where the geology is accessible (outcrops, quarry sites) and transferring the observed properties to a study site deemed geologically similar. While this approach is appealing, it is difficult to put in place because of the lack of access to well-documented analog data. In this paper we present comprehensive analog data sets which characterize sedimentary structures from important groundwater hosting formations in Germany and Brazil. Multiple 2-D outcrop faces are described in terms of hydraulic, thermal and chemical properties and interpolated in 3-D using stochastic techniques. These unique data sets can be used by the wider community to implement analog approaches for characterizing reservoir and aquifer formations.

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“…Aquifer analogues consist of centimetreresolution data obtained from detailed investigation of geological formations at outcrops. Although aquifer analogues are rare, they have been widely used in different subsurface fields (Höyng et al, 2015;Beaujean et al, 2014;Finkel et al, 2016). The Herten analogue is a well known and rigorously generated 2D outcrop (Bayer et al, 2015a).…”

Section: Herten Aquifer Data Set Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

RHEA v1.0: Enabling fully coupled simulations with hydro-geomechanical heterogeneity

Bastias¹,

Rau

Blum

2021

Geosci. Model Dev.

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Abstract. Realistic modelling of tightly coupled hydro-geomechanical processes is relevant for the assessment of many hydrological and geotechnical applications. Such processes occur in geologic formations and are influenced by natural heterogeneity. Current numerical libraries offer capabilities and physics couplings that have proven to be valuable in many geotechnical fields like gas storage, rock fracturing and Earth resources extraction. However, implementation and verification of the full heterogeneity of subsurface properties using high-resolution field data in coupled simulations has not been done before. We develop, verify and document RHEA (Real HEterogeneity App), an open-source, fully coupled, finite-element application capable of including element-resolution hydro-geomechanical properties in coupled simulations. To extend current modelling capabilities of the Multiphysics Object-Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE), we added new code that handles spatially distributed data of all hydro-geomechanical properties. We further propose a simple yet powerful workflow to facilitate the incorporation of such data to MOOSE. We then verify RHEA with analytical solutions in one and two dimensions and propose a benchmark semi-analytical problem to verify heterogeneous systems with sharp gradients. Finally, we demonstrate RHEA's capabilities with a comprehensive example including realistic properties. With this we demonstrate that RHEA is a verified open-source application able to include complex geology to perform scalable, fully coupled, hydro-geomechanical simulations. Our work is a valuable tool to assess challenging real-world hydro-geomechanical systems that may include different levels of complexity like heterogeneous geology and sharp gradients produced by contrasting subsurface properties.

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Evolution of carbon isotope signatures during reactive transport of hydrocarbons in heterogeneous aquifers

Cited by 17 publications

References 64 publications

Debates—Stochastic subsurface hydrology from theory to practice: Does stochastic subsurface hydrology help solving practical problems of contaminant hydrogeology?

Debates—Stochastic subsurface hydrology from theory to practice: Does stochastic subsurface hydrology help solving practical problems of contaminant hydrogeology?

High resolution multi-facies realizations of sedimentary reservoir and aquifer analogs

RHEA v1.0: Enabling fully coupled simulations with hydro-geomechanical heterogeneity

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