Reducing Flow Measurement Uncertainties Through Accurate Determination of Thermophysical Properties of H2 and CO2 rich Fluid Mixtures

Carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) and Hydrogen Production are the two most viable and immediate engineering solutions to decarbonize our planet at industrial scale towards net-zero (NZ). In addition to the current effort to build new CCUS facilities at high cost, the commercial viability of such decarbonization process could be enhanced by repurposing existing oil and gas infrastructure that have reached the end of their commercial life as part of the CO2 and H2 transport and storage networks.

The same repurposing principle could also be applied for advanced asset management tools and many other equipment such as flow measurement devices for custody transfer applications.

However, fluid production and transport and its custody transfer at production facilities, gathering stations, utilization facilities and sequestration (for LiqScritCO2) or storage (for LiqCryoH2) infrastructure require detail understanding of the fluid thermophysical properties. Currently, there is practically no comprehensive knowledge and understanding on rich mixture streams of LiqScritCO2 and LiqCryoH2 coming out from CO2 capture or H2 production facilities.

Such comprehensive knowledge is vital to design, develop, test and productize suitable technologies to operate the CO2 and H2 network infrastructure safely and accurately. In particular, to understand and ensure its safe operations through flow assurance as well as to attract investment, transaction and taxation, accurate measurement with reduced uncertainties is crucial.

This will create confidence for businesses to invest while it also allows for government subsidies or taxations to be applied uniformly and accurately.

As a responsible business, OGM is investing to repurpose its ground breaking quantity measurement (flow metering) and quality measurement (mixing and sampling) devices for the CO2 and H2 economy. This project will provide OGM the highly sought after expertise from an A4I partner to develop suitable and accurate thermophysical properties or equation of state (EoS) model and its subsequent implementation as an open and portable computational library so that we can encapsulate it in the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation tools that will be developed to serve as a framework Digital-Twin for our Ultrasonic Flow Meter (UFM).

The developed tools in turn will be used to optimize, validate and repurpose our UFM for the H2 and CCUS economy custody transfer metering applications. This innovative approach could be used routinely in future product development, testing and validation - faster, cheaper and with significantly smaller carbon footprint too.