London April 2017 Biannual: Qatar CCS Mulitscale Imaging Laboratory tour

The tour throughout the ‘Qatar Carbonates and Carbon Storage Research Centre’ continued with the visit to the CCS Multiscale Imaging Laboratory;  a number of researchers and professionals took our group into the facility and explained to us the purpose of imaging of flow in porous media at different length scales; multi-scale and multi-physics simulations are complemented to the system.

According to the researchers, state-of-art imaging equipment is used in their research to discover the fundamentals of CO₂ storage within carbonates: this includes a Medical CT with a 0.25mm resolution, a Micro CT scanner, a Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope. In other words, all this equipment is used to accurately study the physical and chemical processes governing carbon dioxide injection and trapping in carbonate reservoirs. Both hot and pressurized conditions – present in subsurface reservoir – can be reproduced to enhance with imaging flow all the reaction occurring in the individual pores and rock samples.

This facility, sponsored by Qatar Petroleum, Shell and Qatar Science and Technology Park, has been proudly defined by the team at Imperial College as unique in the world and capable of aiding in addressing key areas of investigation such as the provision of brine relative permeability, the study of coupled flow, phase exchange and reaction.