NETL develops advanced CO2 foam reservoir simulator

A new equation-of-state simulator was developed by the U.S. Department of Energy. It can simulate various recovery processes and includes several mobility control options, such as foam. This makes DOE-CO2 an advanced tool for scoping studies, and for simulating foam and mobility control processes in pilot or field applications. This article presents novel, physical approaches in modeling the CO2 foam processes and phase behavior improvements to previous UTCOMP models, as well as coupling a poroelastical model to account for geomechanical events. Improvements in numerical aspects of modeling and computational efficiency are also presented. Since post-processing and visualization of simulation results is becoming increasingly important in presenting results, a new version of S3GRAF was provided to support well data and 3D grid results.