Consequence Study on Toxicity of Carbon Dioxide Release in Seawater

Consequence study of carbon dioxide release in seawater is becoming the one of the prevailing environmental concerns in this recent decade, mainly due to its potential harm to the ecosystem as well as the livelihood of the people whom depends upon it. Normally, carbon dioxide release is likely to take place in naturally occurring seabed fracture or man-made structure such as underwater carbon sequestering region or pipeline rupture. According to past simulation done by preceding experts, the majority of the results describes that the carbon dioxide plume tend not to escape to the surface of the seawater and is usually localized or confined in within certain boundary if the tidal mixing effect is minimal. Most of the modeling of carbon dioxide behavior done is based on the respective mathematical correlation or formulation designed to increase accuracy and reliability. However, for the sake of simplicity and compatibility with the scope of this project, the behavior of carbon dioxide toxicity release in seawater will be modeled using ANSYS Fluent Simulation Software using pertinent data acquired from other peer-reviewed research paper done by Fadzil (2012) and Dissanayake (2012). The location of the scenario chosen for this simulation is within the vicinity of South China Sea, as it is currently the target area for carbon capture storage system by the Malaysian authority. From the simulation of sub-seabed leakage, it is found that the simulation result is in great conformance with the physiochemical modeling of carbon dioxide release in seawater conducted by Dewar et al (2013). The maximum concentration of carbon dioxide and dispersed plume height rise acquired are 8.50E+09 ppm and 75.12 m respectively, yielding percentage errors of less than 10% for both of the parameters. However, pipeline leakage scenario is not taken into account to the due lack of experimental and simulation data for model verification and validation. The result obtained from this simulation is hoped to be utilized by any party involved in Carbon Sequestration and Storage System Project in Malaysia as value-added data.