Permeability evolution due to dissolution and precipitation of carbonates using reactive transport modeling in pore networks

Abstract

[1] A reactive transport model was developed to simulate reaction of carbonates within a pore network for the high-pressure CO 2 -acidified conditions relevant to geological carbon sequestration. The pore network was based on a synthetic oolithic dolostone. Simulation results produced insights that can inform continuum-scale models regarding reactioninduced changes in permeability and porosity. As expected, permeability increased extensively with dissolution caused by high concentrations of carbonic acid, but neither pH nor calcite saturation state alone was a good predictor of the effects, as may sometimes be the case. Complex temporal evolutions of interstitial brine chemistry and network structure led to the counterintuitive finding that a far-from-equilibrium solution produced less permeability change than a nearer-to-equilibrium solution at the same pH. This was explained by the pH buffering that increased carbonate ion concentration and inhibited further reaction. Simulations of different flow conditions produced a nonunique set of permeability-porosity relationships. Diffusive-dominated systems caused dissolution to be localized near the inlet, leading to substantial porosity change but relatively small permeability change. For the same extent of porosity change caused from advective transport, the domain changed uniformly, leading to a large permeability change. Regarding precipitation, permeability changes happen much slower compared to dissolution-induced changes and small amounts of precipitation, even if located only near the inlet, can lead to large changes in permeability. Exponent values for a power law that relates changes in permeability and porosity ranged from 2 to 10, but a value of 6 held constant when conditions led to uniform changes throughout the domain.Citation: Nogues, J. P., J. P. Fitts, M. A. Celia, and C. A. Peters (2013), Permeability evolution due to dissolution and precipitation of carbonates using reactive transport modeling in pore networks, Water Resour. Res., 49,[6006][6007][6008][6009][6010][6011][6012][6013][6014][6015][6016][6017][6018][6019][6020][6021]

A forward analysis on the applicability of tracer breakthrough profiles in revealing the pore structure of tight gas sandstone and carbonate rocks

“…These include: the mixed-cell method (MCM) [e.g., Acharya et al, 2005;Bryntesson, 2002;Kim et al, 2011;Li et al, 2006;Mehmani et al, 2012;Nogues et al, 2013], random walk [e.g., Sorbie and Clifford, 1991;Bruderer and Bernabe, 2001;Bijeljic et al, 2004;Jha et al, 2011], smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) [e.g., Zhu and Fox, 2002], lattice Boltzmann (LB) [e.g., Kang et al, 2006], and classical Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) [e.g., Shen et al, 2011]. In this work, we employ MCM because of its overall simplicity and computational efficiency.…”

Numerical Investigation into the Impact of CO2-Water-Rock Interactions on CO2 Injectivity at the Shenhua CCS Demonstration Project, China

“…Reactive transport modeling has been previously used to investigate geochemical reactions and their effects on permeability and porosity evolution [14,15,[23][24][25][26]. André et al [14] simulated CO 2 storage in the carbonate-rich Dogger aquifer in the Paris Basin (France) using the reactive transport simulator TOUGHREACT.…”

“…This was in accordance with the reactive flow-through experimental study by Luquot and Gouze [15] for the same basin. Some studies [25,26] also reported that geochemical reactions dissolved the host rock increasing porosity and permeability thereby affecting fluid flow through reactive transport modeling. On the other hand, Izgec et al [23] found that CO 2 injection into carbonate aquifers simulated using CMG's STARS could result in permeability reduction as well as improvement depending on the balance between mineral dissolution and precipitation.…”

Quantifying fracture geometry with X-ray tomography: Technique of Iterative Local Thresholding (TILT) for 3D image segmentation

“…xCT imaging has been used to provide valuable insights in core-flow experiments designed to investigate fractures in the context of geohydrological, geochemical, and geomechanical processes of the deep subsurface, such as CO 2 geological storage [20,30,40] and oil and gas operations [13-15, 17, 41-46]. Quantitative characterizations of fracture geometries have advanced our understanding of fracture hydrodynamics [13,17,21,[47][48][49], reactivity [11,24,25,35,36,47,[50][51][52][53], and mechanics [16,19,37].…”