
Suresh Kumar GovindarajanIndian Institute of Technology Madras | IIT Madras · Department of Ocean Engineering
Suresh Kumar Govindarajan
Doctor of Philosophy
Professor (HAG) - Petroleum Engineering - IIT Madras
About
332
Publications
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Introduction
Dr. Suresh Kumar Govindarajan is a Professor (HAG) of Petroleum Engineering associated with the Department of Ocean Engineering @ IIT-Madras. He heads Reservoir Simulation Laboratory and his broad research area focuses on Multi-Phase Fluid Flow through Fractured & Unconventional Oil/Gas Reservoirs; Reservoir Engineering; Reservoir Simulation; EOR; CO2 Sequestration; Flow through Shale Gas & CBM Reservoirs; Groundwater Hydrology; Contaminant Transport Modeling; Enhanced Geothermal Energy System
Additional affiliations
June 2006 - May 2007
Education
March 1998 - November 2003
August 1996 - March 1998
Publications
Publications (332)
Geological disposal of CO2 after capturing the gas from large emitting sources is one of the safest and most prominent methods to eliminate CO2 from the atmosphere and mitigate climate change. The heterogeneities in porosity, permeability and capillary pressure in various underground formations impact gas distribution, affecting their storage capac...
CO2 sequestration in geological formations is an efficient step towards mitigating climate change by reducing global warming. The CO2 emitted from natural sources and anthropogenic activities is injected into geological formations. The flow and transport of CO2 during sequestration operations require in-depth knowledge of the effects of the type of...
The increase in the emissions of greenhouse gases is driving the rapid climate change in the earth’s environment. Carbon dioxide is one of the abundant greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere. Capturing CO2 gas is essential to limit gas emissions released into the surrounding environment. CO2 sequestration into deep geological formations is a...
The effect of natural fractures, their orientation, and their interaction with hydraulic fractures on the extraction of heat and the extension of injection fluid are fully examined. A fully coupled and dynamic thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) model is utilized to examine the behavior of a fractured geothermal reservoir with supercritical CO2 as a geof...
The present work details the development of a compositional model to replicate the heavy hydrocarbon flow in porous reservoir systems under non-isothermal conditions. The mathematical model considers mass and energy conservation equations describing the reactive of natural variables distributed in a multiphase hydrocarbon system. Such natural varia...
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is regarded as the feasible solution to mitigate CO 2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels in large-scale industries to meet energy demand. The storage of CCS requires the injection of CO 2 gas captured from bulk sources into geological formations. Deep saline aquifers are the largest identified sto...
The heterogeneity in the spatial distribution of initial water saturation influences the performance of hot water flooding. The prospect of a reduction in oil recovery arises from the development of viscous instability. In the present study, a numerical simulation model has been developed by coupling heat transport, and multiphase flow in porous me...
In the present work, bamboo-shaped Oxidized Multi-walled Carbon Nanotubes (O-MWCNT) synthesized through catalytic decomposition of natural gas were reinforced in a silica matrix to achieve a robust O-MWCNT-silica aerogel. The synthesized aerogel was hydrophobisized through surface modification with trimethylsilyl chloride for its application as an...
What to expect following vaccination?
Global Warming to Climate Change: Is it an ‘Art’ to be believed or a ‘Science’ to be inquired?
The influence of cleat permeability and porosity on the cumulative gas produced is studied. The cleat parameters are weighed for producing reserve in the least time and the minimum breakdown pressure requirement to create fractures. The reservoir is stimulated. The breakdown pressure required is more to create fractures at closer spacing than neede...
Sorption is a necessary process influencing the subsurface solute or contaminant transport. There are many adsorption isotherms, and selecting one to represent the system is likely to remain an elusive goal. Also, the lack of observed data and its associated certainty may hinder the determination of sorption parameters. This study investigated the...
Capture zone analysis has been a prominent aspect in managing water supply wells. The study of aquifer vulnerability and protection also employs groundwater age modeling. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of capture zones and groundwater age was used to propose a new method to understand the age fractions of water reaching pumping wells. The conc...
In the present work, fully coupled dynamic thermo-hydro-mechanical (THM) model was employed to investigate the advantage and disadvantages of supercritical CO2 (SCCO2) over water as geofluids. Low-temperature zone was found in both SCCO2-EGS and water-EGS systems, but spatial expansion is higher in water-EGS. Although, the spatial expansion of SCCO...
The amount of oil together with the water Originally in Place (OIP), makes up the liquid phase in heavy oil reservoir systems. This amount of liquid present in the pores of the reservoir system is known as liquid saturation, plays a vital role in improving oil recovery through In-Situ Combustion (ISC) process. The oil phase acts as fuel in generati...
Groundwater management has emerged as an utmost necessity with the declining groundwater levels due to excessive extraction rates. The recharge–extraction operations play an essential role within the backdrop of artificial recharge of the aquifers with injection wells. Analysis of various management scenarios was done by numerical modeling. Visual...
Reservoir Porosity Porosity remains to be a fundamental and critical parameter for the characterization of a petroleum reservoir's pore structures. Porosity along with permeability are defined to be the fundamental reservoir geological units. Porosity corresponds to the volume of interstices that can contain water, oil and gas related to the total...
In this study, an attempt has been made to explore the influence of four inflow boundary conditions on solute plume migration and compared their concentrations. A numerical model was used to simulate the solute transport for different boundary conditions at the injection well with three different recharge and six hydraulic conductivity scenarios. D...
For an efficient field implementation of MEOR process, crucial microbial, formation rock and physicochemical properties, and operational parameters must be characterized and optimized. The present study numerically investigates the impacts of nutrient competition, toxicity, pulse injection time (t_pulse), media heterogeneity, and microbial reversib...
The Puga geothermal reservoir is located in the south-eastern part of Ladakh (Himalayan region, India), and it is providing encouraging results towards heat production. We proposed an improved mathematical model for the fully coupled thermo-hydro-geomechanical model to examine the variations in the Puga geothermal reservoir at between 4500 m from t...
Formation pressure is an important indicator of the field production potential. Currently the common practice to estimate reservoir pressure is hydrodynamic exploration test. This method requires shutting down the well, often for long times. Such long shutdowns lead to less production from the reservoir and worsen the economics of the field. Here w...
In an era of increasing energy demand, declining oil fields, and fluctuating crude oil prices globally, most oil companies are looking forward to implementing cost-effective and environmentally sustainable enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques such as low salinity waterflooding (LSWF) and microbial EOR (MEOR). The present study numerically investi...
Heavy oil and water dispersed flows in a 0.0254 m, 0.0381 m, 0.0508 m ID horizontal pipelines (Pipeline length = 2.5 m) were investigated experimentally and numerically (at steady state) without and with additives by varying the temperature from 25 °C to 50 °C by considering power law (i.e., for emulsion) rheological behavior. The development of bo...
Colloid occurrence is a crucial factor influencing the movement of hydrophobic components like petroleum hydrocarbons in fractured aquifers. In this study, an attempt is made to examine the influence of colloids on the movement of Benzene, Toluene, Ethylbenzene, and Xylene (BTEX) in a saturated fractured rock aquifer. A numerical model is developed...
Understanding the intricacies of inter-dependency of fluid flow and solute transfer at the scale of a single fracture is limited by various simplifying assumptions employed for computational purposes. In the present study, the fracture-rock matrix interface is assumed to be consisting of a skin layer with sufficient mass transfer properties where n...
In this research work, the thermo-hydro-geomechanical (THM) model is upgraded by including dynamic fluid, rock and fracture properties, and integrated machine learning (ML)-response surface model (RSM)-autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to enhance the heat production from a geothermal reservoir. Changes in reservoir pressure, te...
Injection of acidic formulations into a carbonate reservoir is commonly used in the oil industry to enhance or restore well productivity. The purpose of this method is to create empty channels, the so-called wormholes, which pass deeper into the formation further than the perforated area in the near-wellbore zone of the formation. During the oil pr...
The present work investigates the ability of robust biochar from Gracilaria Rhodophyta red weeds collected from the deep sea waters of the Bay of Bengal, for sequential removal of silver and Brilliant Green (BG) dye from contaminated water. The impacting operating parameters viz contact time, the dosage of biochar, pH, and initial Ag+ concentration...
In an era of increasing energy demand, declining oil fields and fluctuating crude oil prices globally, most oil companies are looking forward to implementing cost effective and environmentally sustainable enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques such as low salinity waterflooding (LSWF) and microbial EOR (MEOR). The present study numerically investig...
Subsurface contamination is a frequent occurrence in fractured porous systems, posing a potential threat for the groundwater contamination. Tracking the movement of these contaminants is an inherent aspect of effective remediation strategy. The non-isothermal conditions prevailing in the subsurface environment further add to the complexity of the e...
The influence of hydraulic conductivity on the movement of flow and nonreactive solute transport through aquifers was evaluated. Several different log-normal probability distribution functions bounded within a fixed range were adopted for simulating the heterogeneous spatial distribution of hydraulic conductivity. Programming codes for two-dimensio...
Well killing remains to be the critical technological stage before proceeding with workover operations. Well killing using Visco-Elastic Gel (VEG) has been found to preserve and reinstate the filtration characteristics of bottom-hole formation zone efficiently. Since, these methods exclude the possibility of penetration of well-killing fluids into...
Wettability remains one of the critical multi-phase fluid flow parameters while characterizing an oil-water petroleum reservoir system. Treating the reservoir to be either completely oil-wet or completely water-wet disguises the actual physics behind reservoir wettability. While the actual wettability is described at the sub-pore-scale, a field-sca...
The subsurface leaching of soluble chemicals in a fractured porous medium poses long-term risk of groundwater contamination. Tracing the occurrence, movement and consequences of such hydro-geo-chemical interactions is the fundamental process for an effective remediation plan. However, the complexity of geomorphology and mass transfer mechanisms mak...
Coal reservoir productions depend entirely on cleat permeability and porosity values. The models used to date to calculate cleat parameters are either stress-dependent or strain-dependent. A study is carried to analyze the individual effects of stress and strain on the reservoir and fluid properties. A one-dimensional cleat for an under saturated l...
Understanding the heat transfer mechanism in the subsurface is essential for designing geothermal heat extraction system as well as oil extraction system in petroleum reservoirs. Due to the inherent variability in thermal diffusivity in the rock matrix-fracture system, this interface can either act as a source or sink for temperature. The main obje...
The objective of this study is to analyse the movement of nitrates and dissolved oxygen under the effect of denitrification in a fracture–matrix (F–M) system with skin formation. An implicit finite difference scheme is developed to model the coupled nonlinear partial differential equations. A varying grid is considered at the fracture–skin interfac...
The global lifestyle of this modern world has become more dependent on petroleum-based products, whose applications are involved almost everywhere. Since a large quantity of oil is being used on a daily basis, the spilling of oil by various means during its storage and transportation has become inevitable. This work focuses on the spilling of oil i...
The ever-growing energy demands, declining oil prices, dwindling new findings of oil/gas reservoirs, complexity, and uncertainty associated with unconventional oil/gas supplies; and the seriousness towards mitigating the greenhouse gas emissions essentially implies the risky and uncertain nature of future energy at the global scale. Such a risky an...
During the implementation of microbial enhanced oil recovery (MEOR) technique in reservoirs, various reservoir and microbial kinetic parameters play major roles in governing the efficiency of crude oil recovery from hydrocarbon reservoirs. The present study numerically investigates the sensitivity of reservoir porosity, injected microbial species a...
The effects of the coupled reservoir and fluid properties, in addition to the geomechanical effects in the reservoir, are studied on reservoir pressure and cumulative gas produced. The behavioral variation of reservoir pressure, rock properties, and fluid properties are, numerically, studied both spatially and temporally.
The coal formation, subjec...
Dewatering the formation is the conventional methodology used when extracting methane (CH4) from the coal bed formation. A novel approach of not initially dewatering is to be studied. The approach has many advantages regarding the quantity of water produced, ground subsidence, and many more. Proving the latter best over the former requires several...
A fully coupled two-phase fluid flow and geomechanical model has been used to investigate the impact of injection fluid flow and geomechanics on reservoir pressure, effective stresses and strain, vertical displacements, viscous fingering instability, and viscous dissipation during the displacement of a viscous oil by water in a heterogeneous fractu...
Abstract: The effects of stresses and strains, occurring in a reservoir, on the cumulative gas production and the petrophysical properties are studied. Existing strain and stress model equations have been used to analyze the coupled effect of matrix shrinkage and cleat compressibility change on reservoir properties. A Coal Bed Methane (CBM) gas res...
The focus of the present work is to develop the two-phase immiscible and incompressible fluid flow solver for porous medium using the object-oriented (C++) Open Source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) toolbox known as OpenFOAM. The reason for choosing the OpenFOAM framework is first elaborated by looking into the history of the programming concep...
Low Salinity Water Flooding (LSWF) is an improved water flooding technique that enhances the oil recovery with a relatively cheaper cost. Such technique becomes vital as the oil price keeps falling significantly at the global scale. Although plenty of research work has been devoted towards LSWF in conventional sandstone reservoirs, the research on...
During the implementation of a microbial-enhanced-oil-recovery (EOR) (MEOR) technique in a sandstone formation, various reservoir physicochemical, microbial kinetic, and operational parameters play major roles in governing the efficiency of crude-oil recovery from a hydrocarbon reservoir. The present study numerically investigates the sensitivity o...
The present work focuses on the improvement of flow properties during the transportation of heavy oil via 0.0254-, 0.0381-, and 0.0508-m-diameter pipelines. The effect of temperature, water cut, natural extract Madhuca Longifolia (ML), and potato starch (PS) on pressure drop, shear viscosity, and flow behavior index (n) was experimentally investiga...
In the present study, improved mathematical and numerical models are developed in order to simulate the influence of important reservoir (effective porosity and longitudinal dispersivity), fluid and microbial kinetic (Monod half-saturation constant, substrate to biomass yield coefficient and substrate inhibition) parameters on dynamics of in-Situ m...
Following the increasing global energy demand and oil prices, gas production has attracted the energy firms significantly. Apart from the natural gas production from conventional reservoirs, production of shale gas from unconventional reservoirs has contributed significantly in meeting the global energy demand despite its environmental impacts. Alb...
This paper emphasizes on the development of an improved mathematical model to understand the single-phase gas flow in a coupled matrix-fracture fluid mass exchange in a stress-sensitive reservoir along with the numerical investigations. Traditional methods for gas flow in fractured reservoirs don’t take into account the stress-sensitive fracture pe...
This manuscript primarily focuses on the constraints associated with the extended version of Darcy's law that is used to describe the multiphase flow through a porous media; and in particular, a petroleum reservoir. This manuscript clearly brings out the basics associated with the usage of Darcy's law, and reasons out the inapplicability of the Nav...
Any successful primary cementing operation at elevated temperature condition requires an efficient displacement of fluid surrounding the casing by cement slurry. In such conditions the cement slurry should be designed in such a way that it should be compatible with both cement and drilling mud. To achieve these requirements we designed the cement s...
The aquifer in Tondiarpet, Chennai, had been severely contaminated with petroleum fuels due to an underground pipeline leakage. Groundwater samples were analyzed quarterly for priority pollutants such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylenes, and naphthalene (BTEXN) using purge and trap gas chromatography and mass spectrometer from 2016 to 2018....
Discrete groundwater level datasets are interpolated often using kriging group of models to produce a spatially continuous groundwater level map. There is always some level of uncertainty associated with different interpolation methods. Therefore, we developed a new trend function with the mean groundwater level as a drift variable in the regressio...
Electrochemical advanced oxidation experiments were conducted to investigate the degradation of total petroleum hydrocarbons (TPH), nC12 to nC23 alkanes and priority pollutants such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in petroleum-contaminated water using an inexpensive Ti/Sb-SnO2/PbO2 anode. The influence of electrolyte, applied current, tr...
Rate of Penetration (ROP) is one of the important factors influencing the drilling efficiency. Since cost recovery is an important bottom line in the drilling industry, optimizing ROP is essential to minimize the drilling operational cost and capital cost. Traditional the empirical models are not adaptive to new lithology changes and hence the pred...
Dynamic variation of porosity, permeability, and elastic modulus was considered in order to investigate the single-phase fluid flow in a fractured porous media using fully coupled hydro and geomechanical models. The development of streamlines, pressure distribution, effective stress and strain generations have been extensively studied. However, fro...
Studies on mass transfer and transport of dissolved contaminants through heterogeneous hydrogeology rely on realistic expressions of their functional parameters. Hydrodynamic dispersion is one such parameter inheriting significant ambiguities in its estimation when subjected to heterogeneous flow conditions. In this study, a numerical model has bee...
Abstract. A total of around ~2 Trillion barrels of viscous crude oil is present in a carbonate reservoir. The heavy oil present in Fractured Carbonate Reser-voir (FCR) encompasses an enormous potential to contribute to the world’s oil needs. Continuous steam flooding Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) used as a tertiary method to increase recovery from th...
The purpose of this study is to present an overview on the significance and abundance of CBM gas from the perspective of global energy demand; storage and transmission of methane gas in a CBM Reservoir; general characterization of a CBM Reservoir; and reservoir properties of coal beds. The reviews clearly suggest that an enhanced research focus on...
Abstract: Coal is a rich source of methane gas. The gas adsorbed onto the coal grains can be produced from comparatively lower depths compared to the conventional reservoirs. An insight provided of mathematical equations and expressions of coefficients. The study focuses on the cleat properties and the fluids present in it at each time step. Dewate...
Abstract. The dry CBM (Coal Bed Methane) reservoir contains methane gas and irreducible water contrary to wet reservoir. The studies have been shown economical production can be achieved in dry CBM reservoir. The coal seam consists of cleat and matrix arrangement where cleat have more permeability and less porosity while matrix accounts for storage...
Low Salinity Water Flooding (LSWF) is an improved water flooding technique that enhances the oil recovery with a relatively cheaper cost. Such technique becomes vital as the oil price keeps falling significantly at the global scale. Although plenty of research work has been devoted towards LSWF in conventional sandstone reservoirs, the research on...
ABSTRACT
An attempt has been made in order to critically review the conceptual and mathematical modelling techniques as applied to a typical sandstone and fractured reservoirs. The typical as well as peculiar fluid dynamics associated with these reservoirs have been discussed in detail. It is emphasized in the present review that the focus on conce...
A fully coupled hydro and geomechanical model has been used in order to predict the transient pressure disturbance, reservoir deformation, and effective stress distribution in both homogeneous and heterogeneous reservoirs. Heterogeneous reservoir is conceptualized by explicitly considering the spatial distributions of porosity and permeability as a...
Richards equation is solved for soil water flow modeling in the unsaturated zone continuum. Interblock hydraulic conductivities, while solving for Richards equation, are estimated by some sort of averaging process based on upstream and downstream nodes hydraulic conductivity values. The accuracy of the interblock hydraulic conductivity estimation m...
A one-dimensional numerical model is developed to predict the benzene concentration in the unsaturated zone with special emphasis on the impact of biological clogging on benzene transport while the bacteria remain in mobile condition. The numerical results suggest that the water saturation during the biological clogging condition reaches its maximu...
The present work proposes the synthesis of robust biochar from Gracilaria Rhodophyta red weeds for sequential removal of Al(III) and fluoride from wastewater. The sorption experiments have been modeled by preliminary optimization of operational parameters using 2 ⁴ factorial statistical modeling. The model has estimated an optimum sequential synerg...
Abstract:
Darcy’s law is the fundamental equation that is used to describe the flow of fluids within a classical porous medium with a definite hydraulic conductivity and with a porosity varying between 0 and 100 %. This momentum conservation equation for describing isothermal single-phase fluid flow through porous media has been defined at the mac...
Abstract
The matrix fracture shape factor is an important component for the reservoir simulation of fluid flow through a fractured porous medium. Many earlier studies have investigated the matrix fracture shape factor for a single-phase slightly compressible fluid in a fractured medium using constant or variable fracture pressure boundary condition...
Approximately 2 trillion barrels of viscous crude oil is present in fractured carbonate reservoir (FCR), however it accord negligibly to world’s oil production. These class of reservoirs portray dual petrophysical properties i.e. presence of low permeable matrix and high permeable fracture, hence these reservoirs can be termed as complex. Obtaining...
In the present study an attempt has been made to numerically investigate the transport process of microbes coupled with fluid flow in a saturated and homogeneous reservoir system. The bulk movement of microbes from one point to another inside the reservoir is governed by the advection process which is driven by mean fluid velocity. The existing vel...