INVESTIGATION OF EFFICIENCY IMPROVEMENTS DURING CO2 INJECTION IN HYDRAULICALLY AND NATURALLY FRACTURED RESERVOIRS

This report describes the work performed during the second year of the project, ''Investigating of Efficiency Improvements during CO{sub 2} Injection in Hydraulically and Naturally Fractured Reservoirs.'' The objective of this project is to perform unique laboratory experiments with artificial fractured cores (AFCs) and X-ray CT to examine the physical mechanisms of bypassing in HFR and NFR that eventually result in less efficient CO{sub 2} flooding in heterogeneous or fracture-dominated reservoirs. To achieve this objective, in this period we concentrated our effort on modeling the fluid flow in fracture surface, examining the fluid transfer mechanisms and describing the fracture aperture distribution under different overburden pressure using X-ray CT scanner