CESEP Brine Leakage Control Experiment

The Center for Experimental Study of Subsurface Environmental Processes (CESEP) conducted an intermediate-scale laboratory experiment to validate a developed approach for designing control systems for the potential brine leakage from CO2 storage zones. The developed approach applies the technique of deep brine extraction to control the leakage, thus it incorporates the global optimizer of Genetic Algorithm (GA) and a FEFLOW-based transport model to find the best extraction locations in the storage zone that minimizes the needed amount of extracted brine. In an ~8m long soil tank, a brine leakage plume was controlled using the extraction system designed based on the GA results. Collected data was then used to first make sure that the GA results and boundary conditions were accurately applied in the experiment and second to evaluate whether the observed plume concentrations in the shallow aquifer met the predefined constraining limits in the optimization problem. Acquired data during the experiment included transient measurements of the injection and extraction flow rates as well as plume concentrations. The conducted experiment and the testing system are described in detail in a research article developed by the dataset authors and entitled "Monitoring Brine Leakage from Deep Geologic Formations Storing Carbon Dioxide: Design Framework Validation Using Intermediate-Scale Experiment". For any questions, users are referred to the data owners.