ad-micp: A third-party module for MRST to study CO2 leakage remediation by microbially induced calcite precipitation

MICP is a new and sustainable technology which utilizes biochemical processes to create barriers by calcium carbonate cementation; therefore, this technology has a potential to be used for sealing leakage zones in geological formations. We have developed a mathematical model for this technology suitable for field-scale studies. Further information on the model can be found in https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijggc.2021.103256. In this talk, we focus on details in the implementation of this MICP mathematical model in MRST. This implementation is largely based on the polymer examples in the ad-eor module (black-oil model + one transport equation). We have added two additional transport equations and two mass balance equations to model the transport of dissolve components (suspended microbes, oxygen, and urea) and solid phases (biofilm and calcite). In addition, we have implemented dispersion of transported components, permeability changes due to calcite and biofilm formation, and biofilm detachment due to shear forces. The spatial discretization is performed using internal functions in MRST and the external mesh generator DistMesh. There are seven numerical examples accompanying this module where MICP studies are performed on different 1D, 2D, and 3D flow systems. The ad-micp module was first implemented in the 2020b MRST release, but it has been updated to the latest MRST release (2021a) and it is compatible with GNU Octave. https://www.sintef.no/projectweb/mrst/mrst-symposium-2021/plenary-abstracts/#Tu4 https://github.com/daavid00/ad-micp