Estimating maximum sustainable injection pressure during geological sequestration of CO2 using coupled fluid flow and geomechanical fault-slip analysis

This paper demonstrates the use of coupled fluid flow and geomechanical fault slip (fault reactivation) analysis to estimate the maximum sustainable injection pressure during geological sequestration of CO2. Two numerical modeling approaches for analyzing fault-slip are applied, one using continuum stress–strain analysis and the other using discrete fault analysis. The results of these two approaches to numerical fault-slip analyses are compared to the results of a more conventional analytical fault-slip analysis that assumes simplified reservoir geometry. It is shown that the simplified analytical fault-slip analysis may lead to either overestimation or underestimation of the maximum sustainable injection pressure because it cannot resolve important geometrical factors associated with the injection-induced spatial evolution of fluid pressure and stress. We conclude that a fully coupled numerical analysis can more accurately account for the spatial evolution of both in situ stresses and fluid pressure, and therefore results in a more accurate estimation of the maximum sustainable CO2 injection pressure.