The School of Earth Sciences (SES) at the Ohio State University (OSU) is seeking to fill a Postdoctoral Research position to work on numerical modeling of CO₂ injection and transport of multiple tracers (perfluorocarbon, isotopes) related to the Cranfield Mississippi CO₂ injection field site. The position is funded through the NETL-DOE grant “Monitoring of Geological CO₂ Sequestration Using Isotopes and PF Tracers”, which involves collaborations between Oak Ridge National Laboratory (PI), OSU, the University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, the US Geological Survey, and the Southeastern Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership. Data gathering has been ongoing as part of this project since 2009 and has produced a rich data set that offers unique opportunities to characterize and model a field scale carbon sequestration experiment.

Previous modeling efforts have succeeded in matching the early pressure response, but suggest that at the highest CO₂ injection rate the formation may have been fractured. This effort aims to further expand our understanding of this experiment by building on an in-house reservoir simulator for multiphase compositional flow to incorporate the transport of inert tracers, chemical reactions, and the geomechanical response to high-rate/high-pressure CO₂ injection. Matching the tracer field data with a physical/numerical model will improve our Monitoring, Verification and Accounting (MVA) system for carbon sequestration.

The search will remain open until a suitable candidate has been found. The start date can be as early as July 1st, but ideally no later than September. We offer a competitive salary commensurate with experience, with support for relocation expenses and OSU benefits. The position is initially for 2 years, with the opportunity of continuation depending on progress and availability of funding. OSU accepts online applications only.

I’m very excited to have received my Ohio Super Computer start-up grant. Our reservoir simulator is ported over and working on the OSC cluster. However, I could use some help with both OpenMP optimization (short term parallelization) and implementation of the parallel solver Petsc (for large-scale problems). Any one with experience and interest, please contact me.

Starting next week, I’ll be teaching the EARTHSC 2205 ‘Planets’ course. More information is now available under Teaching.

Schlumberger has generously donated multiple 3-year-use licenses to various modules of their Eclipse software to our group. Eclipse is the leading Reservoir Simulator for engineers in the petroleum industry. These simulators can be used for thesis research. Additionally, hands-on experience with this software can be an asset for students interested in a career in the energy sector. We will have the following options available for student use:

1. Black Oil Simulator
2. Compositional Simulator
3. Thermal Simulator
4. CO₂ EOR and Sequestration
5. Fractured Reservoirs

The annual Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union was fun, interesting, overwhelming, and motivating as always. Of particular interest in relation to our work, were the presented results for the adaptive mesh refinement projects at Imperial College London as applied to multiphase flow in porous media. The accuracy of computational/simulation results can be improved either by increasing the order of approximation (our work) or by refining the mesh as a whole (static mesh), or only where increased accuracy is required (adaptive mesh). It will be interesting to compare the performance of both approaches.

Just returned from a fruitful trip to KAUST to visit dr Shuyu Sun and give a seminar at the department of Earth Science and Engineering. KAUST is a fascinating experiment, where an entire university with ambitious academic goals was created out of thin air in the desert on the shores of the Red Sea in just the past few years. Shuyu Sun is one of the founding faculty of the department, co-director of the Center for Subsurface Imaging and Fluid Modeling consortium (CSIM) and PI for the Computational Transport Phenomena Laboratory (CTPL). Shuyu and his group members are evaluating various interesting alternative numerical methods in subsurface flow modeling, and between excellent meals and bowling competitions we discussed exciting avenues for future collaborative research.

Hanna Brourman will do her undergraduate thesis research on fingering behavior. The goal is to investigate the importance of various physical parameters, such as (un)correlated formation heterogeneities, as well as numerical issues that can influence the reliability of numerical simulations. For the latter, we have the option to compare results from our own reservoir simulator to two widely used simulators that were developed in the industry and a National Laboratory, respectively.