Exact Solution for Water Evaporation During CO2 Injection.

The objective of this study is to develop an analytical model for 1D gas‐water flow with evaporation of water into the mobile gas phase. The evaporation rate is proportional to the fluid‐fluid interfacial area, which is a function of the water saturation. Introduction of saturation‐dependent potential allows reducing the 2 × 2 non‐linear system of PDEs to one hyperbolic equation. The saturation distribution is obtained by non‐linear method of characteristics. The first integral allows for explicit expression of the vapor concentration versus saturation. It was shown that typical properties of rock‐CO2‐water system, the evaporation time has order of magnitude of millions of pore volumes injected. Close match was observed between a series of three corefloods and the analytical model, and the tuned model coefficients belong to their common intervals. This validates the developed model for 1D gas‐water flow with water evaporation into the injected gas. Plain Language Summary: During injection of carbon dioxide or other gases into porous media containing small fractions of water, the water phase will slowly evaporate into the injected gas. This process is important as the gradual drying of the porous media near the injection site can lead to formation damage processes such as fines migration and salt precipitation, resulting in a significant decline in the ability to inject more gas. The evaporation process is dependent on the interfacial area between the gas and water. As the evaporation process progresses, this area gets smaller, and the evaporation rate slows down. In this work, we account for this effect directly, and solve the resulting differential equations, providing simple equations that can be used to predict the rate of water evaporation during gas injection. Key Points: Exact solution of gas transport in porous media with non‐equilibrium evaporation kinetics is obtainedThe new solution relies on introducing a new potential function, which reduces the system of non‐linear PDEs to one equationThe resulting exact solution shows good agreement with laboratory data and can predict accurately the evaporation time [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]