ABSTRACT
Reactive transport models (RTM) can be applied to investigate and understand a broad range of environmental problems such as Co2 sequestration, acid mine drainage, aquifer contamination, geochemical weathering, as well as carbon and nutrient cycling at regional and global scales. This chapter reviews benchmarking efforts that compare RTMs on relevant subsurface environmental problems. It summarizes the governing equations for hydrological flow, solute transport, and chemical reactions. The chapter provides a description of the numerical approaches used in RTMs. It describes relevant benchmarking and code comparison activities. The chapter deals with a discussion of the need for new benchmarking activities. It focuses on benchmarking activities in reactive transport modeling in the geosciences and not on the RTMs themselves. The Subsurface Environmental Simulation Benchmarking Workshop was initiated in 2011 as a workshop at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for advancing the understanding and mathematical modeling of subsurface reactive transport processes.
