Date of Award

December 2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Petroleum Engineering

First Advisor

Kegang Ling

Abstract

Nowadays, the world needs more energy than ever before. This need emphasizes that the world also requires a sustainable system that can meet these growing demands while addressing the overall impact on the environment. For this reason, the international community, including all levels of environmental policymakers, have shown a great deal of concern about the tremendous negative effects of fossil fuels on the globe. The impact of carbon dioxide as a Greenhouse Gas (GHG) from burning fossil fuels on the ozone layer and what it entails in global warming and, therefore, climate change has motivated research on finding either alternatives to fossil fuels or making fossil fuels less-harmful source of energy such as converting natural gas to blue hydrogen and then storing it for later use. This research is about Underground Hydrogen Storage (UHS) in a depleted natural gas reservoir and its potential to provide a partial solution to the problem of carbon dioxide emissions. The unique aspect of this research is that it provides a detailed view on how natural gas, as a fossil fuel itself that produces carbon dioxide when combusted, can be used to produce hydrogen as a clean fuel that can be burned without carbon dioxide emissions. The objectives of this thesis, as later explained within the context of research hypothesis, are set to validate the research hypothesis by answering three main research questions. Those objectives are set to investigate the whether the selected reservoir can accommodate the planned amount of hydrogen intended for injection, to assess hydrogen solubility, diffusivity, and hysteresis effects on hydrogen production, to determine the hydrogen production rate efficiency for each production cycle, to investigate number of hydrogen injection-shut in-production cycles needed to achieve a sustainable hydrogen production capable of meeting hydrogen demand, to assess hydrogen injection-shut in-production cycles with two different cushion gases, and to compare this research’s cushion gases effects on UHS application to results obtained from other available UHS research literature. Blue hydrogen will be produced from natural gas, and its productions process is supported by an innovative process termed Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) process. UHS operation has three main performance indicators. They are capacity, deliverability, and hydrogen purity. Capacity is related to reservoir volume, deliverability is related to production rate, and hydrogen purity is the fraction of hydrogen in the produced stream (Ali et al, 2022). A sensitivity analysis study will be performed, and different scenarios and strategies are defined to evaluate the impact of different parameters, such as different cushion gases, on the performance of UHS. The depleted gas reservoir selected for this research is in the Oakford Field, and is located in the state of Pennsylvania, Westmoreland County (Seger, 2007). The gas reservoir in this gas field is the Murrysville Reservoir. Besides the academic literature research and review of all available academic, industrial, and governmental information concerning UHS projects’ initiation, technical considerations, reservoir formation and geological requirements, gas field’s tectonic safety and stability, technical considerations, implementation, environmental and economic factors, and social aspects, the main tool to conduct this study in this research is the commercial numerical simulation software application known as CMG-GEM. This CMG-GEM software package is a reservoir software specialized in compositional, chemical, and unconventional Equation of State based reservoir modeling tool.

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