Exact Solution for Water Evaporation During CO₂ Injection

Abstract

The objective of this study is to develop an analytical model for 1D gas‐water flow with evaporation of water into the mobile gas phase. The evaporation rate is proportional to the fluid‐fluid interfacial area, which is a function of the water saturation. Introduction of saturation‐dependent potential allows reducing the 2 × 2 non‐linear system of PDEs to one hyperbolic equation. The saturation distribution is obtained by non‐linear method of characteristics. The first integral allows for explicit expression of the vapor concentration versus saturation. It was shown that typical properties of rock‐CO2‐water system, the evaporation time has order of magnitude of millions of pore volumes injected. Close match was observed between a series of three corefloods and the analytical model, and the tuned model coefficients belong to their common intervals. This validates the developed model for 1D gas‐water flow with water evaporation into the injected gas.