Investigation of Underground Bio-Methanation Using Bio-Reactive Transport Modeling

Underground bio-methanation is a promising technology for large-scale renewable energy storage. Additionally, it enables the recycling of CO2 via the generation of "renewable methane" in porous reservoirs using in-situ microbes as bio-catalysts. Potential candidate reservoirs are depleted gas fields or even abandoned gas storages, providing enormous storage capacity to balance seasonal energy supply and demand fluctuations. This paper discusses the underlying bio-methanation process as part of the ongoing research project "Bio-UGS – Biological conversion of carbon dioxide and hydrogen to methane," funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). First, the hydrodynamic processes are assessed, and a review of the related microbial processes is provided. Then, based on exemplary field-scale simulations, the bio-reactive transport process and its consequences for operation are evaluated. The hydrogen conversion process was investigated by numerical simulations on field scale. For this, a two-phase multi-component bio-reactive transport model was implemented by (Hagemann 2018) in the open-source DuMux (Flemisch et al. 2011) simulation toolkit for porous media flow. The underlying processes include the transport of reactants and products, consumption of specific components, and the related growth and decay of the microbial population, resulting in a bio-reactive transport model. The microbial kinetic parameters of methanogenic reactions are taken from the available literature. The simulation study covers different scenarios on conceptional field-scale models, studying the impact of well placement, injection rates, and gas compositions. Due to a significant sensitivity of the simulation results to the bio-conversion kinetics, the field-specific conversion rates must be obtained. Thus, the Bio-UGS project is accompanied by laboratory experiments out of the frame of this paper. Other parameters are rather a matter of design; in the present case of depleted gas fields, those parameters are coupled and can be chosen to convert fully hydrogen and carbon dioxide to methane. Especially the well spacing can be considered the main design parameter in the likely case of a given injection rate and gas composition. This study extends the application of the previously developed code from a homogeneous-2D to the heterogeneous-3D case. The simulations mimic the co-injection of carbon dioxide and hydrogen from a 40 MW electrolysis.