Modelling ruptures of buried high pressure dense phase CO2 pipelines in carbon capture and storage applications - Part I. Validation

Carbon dioxide (CO2) capture and storage presents a short-term option for significantly reducing the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere and mitigating the effects of climate change. To this end, National Grid initiated the COOLTRANS research programme to consider the pipeline transportation of high pressure dense phase CO2, including the development and application of a mathematical model for predicting the sonic near-field dispersion of pure CO2 following the venting or failure of such a pipeline. Here, the application of this model to the rupture of a buried pipeline is considered and compared to experimental data obtained through the COOLTRANS programme. The rupture experiment was performed on a 230 m length of 152 mm external diameter pipeline with 300 mm soil cover, equivalent to approximately 1/4 scale when compared to the proposed full-scale 600 mm (24-inch) diameter pipelines with 1.2 m soil cover on average proposed in the UK. The experiment was performed in a pre-formed crater based on experimentally formed craters in other experiments. The comparison demonstrates reasonable quantitative and qualitative agreement. Such validated dispersion flow, to be applied to full-scale rupture modelling in Part II, defines novel, robust, thermodynamically accurate multi-phase source conditions, that enable far-field computational fluid dynamics studies and feed into pragmatic quantified risk assessment models.