Methods for predicting the spreading of steam below the water table during subsurface remediation

Abstract

Steam injection has been efficiently applied in many cases for the remediation of contamination in the unsaturated zone; however, some effort still has to be made to establish this technology in remediation practices for contamination in the saturated zone. The main difficulty here is the lack of reliable methods capable of predicting steam propagation around the injection well in poorly layered aquifers in an early screening stage. In this paper, methods are presented for predicting steam propagation in saturated media. First, a subset of experiments conducted in a two‐dimensional flume is utilized to demonstrate the characteristics of steam propagation in water‐saturated porous media. An improved numerical model concept that for the first time accounts for the variable degrees of freedom in the researched system is successfully tested and compared with an experimental data set. The model is consequently used to derive a set of type curves for the characteristic steam propagation in saturated porous media. These type curves can be used to estimate the steam propagation and the efficiency of a measure. Finally, the applicability and the potential of the developed methods are demonstrated for a pilot‐scale remediation.