Fundamentals of gas containment in unlined rock caverns

Summary The criterion for gas entry into idealized, uniform, water-saturated fractures is examined for one-dimensional, elliptical and cylindrical cavern geometries. This limiting criterion is a necessary condition for gas escape from unlined, pressurized gas storages.Gas-entry phenomena were examined using 450-mm-square glass plates in Hele Shaw configuration with nominal apertures of 50 and 200 microns. The fundamentals of gas entry, as first enunciated by Åberg (1977), are confirmed by the experiments; the critical gas-entry pressure is a function of hydraulic flow regime, fracture-mouth capillarity and fracture-mouth profile. Finite-element simulation based on these fundamentals is substantiated by experimental observations and is therefore used for generalization.The gas-entry criterion is found to be sensitive to details of fracture geometry such as aperture, connection of the fractures to the groundwater regime, geometry of the intersection of the fractures with the gas cavern, disturbance of the rock mass as a consequence of excavation, and cavern shape. In view of the inability to predict or even measure these factors, an alternative criterion which ensures no gas migration away from the gas storage is proposed. This simple criterion insists that gas escape will not occur as long as the water pressure along all possible escape paths increases for some small distance in the direction of potential gas escape. This criterion is a generalization of Åberg's (1977) proposal that the vertical hydraulic gradient should exceed one for no gas escape.