The injection-production plan of salt cavern underground gas storage

The natural gas injection-production performance of salt cavern underground gas storage is an important standard to measure the storage performance and an important factor to effect the storage stability. Based on the measured stratigraphic information, two different shapes of the reservoir model are established. Based on the natural gas market demands, the salt cavern gas storage injection-production plan is formulated. The 30-year period's creep simulation is launched in order to research the salt cavern shrinkage, plastic zone development and salt cavity wall displacement effect with injection-production plan changing. The results confirms that the shape difference is not obvious to the salt cavern cavity property. The volume contraction increases with time extending, but the increasing speed gradually slows. The lowpressure running time is the main stage to cause the shrinkage of salt cavern. The low-pressure running time after emergency gas production is harmful to the salt cavern cavity property. It is recommended that the different salt caverns implement emergency gas production in turn in order to reduce the emergency gas production frequency of individual salt cavern or adopting the immediately follow-up method of gas injection after the end of gas production is available to ensure the long-term effective operation of salt cavern.