Lattice Boltzmann-Based Approaches for Pore-Scale Reactive Transport

Important geoscience and environmental applications such as geologic carbon storage, environmental remediation, and unconventional oil and gas recovery are best understood in the context of reactive flow and multicomponent transport in the subsurface environment. The coupling of chemical and microbiological reactions with hydrological and mechanical processes can lead to complex behaviors across an enormous range of spatial and temporal scales. These coupled responses are also strongly influenced by the heterogeneity and anisotropy of the geologic formations. Reactive transport processes can change the pore morphology at the pore scale, thereby leading to nonlinear interactions with advective and diffusive transport, which can strongly influence larger-scale properties such as permeability and dispersion. Therefore, one of the greatest research challenges is to improve our ability to predict these processes across scales (DOE 2007). The development of pore-scale experimental and modeling methods to study reactive processes involving mineral precipitation and dissolution, and biofilm dynamics allows more fundamental investigation of physical behavior so that more accurate and robust upscaled constitutive models can be developed for the continuum scale. A pore-scale model provides fundamental mechanistic explanations of how biogeochemical processes and pore-scale interfacial reactions alter flow paths by pore plugging (and dissolving) under different geochemical compositions and pore configurations. For example, dissolved CO2 during geological CO2 storage may react with minerals in fractured rocks, confined aquifers, or faults, resulting in cementation (and/or dissolution) and altering hydrodynamics of reactive flow. This can be observed in a natural analogue where primary porosity in sandstone is cemented by carbonate precipitates, affecting dissolved CO2 flow paths at the Little Garde Wash Fault, Utah (e.g., Fig. 1a–b). Several other examples demonstrating macroscopic characteristics of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) precipitation in Figure 1 include an elongated concretion along the groundwater flow direction, CaCO3 precipitation along the vertical pathway sealed …