Influence of carbon nanodots on the carbonate/CO2/brine wettability and CO2-brine interfacial tension: Implications for CO2 geo-storage
Document Type
Journal Article
Publication Title
Fuel
Volume
355
Publisher
Elsevier
School
School of Engineering
RAS ID
64635
Abstract
Understanding the interfacial and wettability phenomena of the CO2-brine and rock-CO2-brine system plays a key role in the geo-storage of CO2 and in their security containment. Carbon nanodots (CNDs) have been identified as a promising surface-active agent for altering the wettability from strongly oil-wet into water-wet in the carbonate reservoirs, thus it contributed for the oil recovery increment in the carbonate formations. However, no consideration was given to the application of CNDs for the enhancement of CO2 geological storage and containment security in the carbonate formations. In the current study, we assessed the impact of CNDs on the residual and structural trapping of CO2 in the carbonate reservoir. The contact angles ( ) of the CO2-brine-carbonate rock system were studied before and after the treatment of CNDs for both the clean and crude oil-aged samples. Subsequently, we also investigated the CO2-seawater interfacial tensions (IFT) with and without CNDs addition. All these measurements were performed as a function of CNDs concentration (0–1000 ppm), temperature (20–80 °C) and pressure (14.7–3000 psi). The results showed that the clean carbonate rock remained strongly water-wet before and after CNDs-treatment. The oil-wet carbonate sample was turned into CO2-wet at all investigated temperatures when the pressures increased to 1000 psi, however, it turns to be weakly water-wet upon treatment with CNDs at the highest pressure (3000 psi). Specifically, at 3000 psia and 20 °C, the contact angle of oil-wet carbonate reduced from 122° to 86° with the addition of CNDs at the increased concentration of 1000 ppm. Such wettability modifications in carbonate formations will enhance the efficacy of CO2 storage potential, and eventually, this will help to de-risk their security containment. The generally demonstrated a declining trend with the increase of CNDs concentration but it slightly increased with the rise in temperature and pressure. These results suggest that warmer reservoirs and increased storage depth could be unfavorable for CO2 storage in carbonate formations. Thus, the pre-injection of a minimal concentration of CNDs in the formation would improve CO2 storage effectively. Also, no significant change was observed in the CO2-seawater IFT in the presence of CNDs, which indicates that the capillary trapping of CO2 could be favorable due to their lower contact angle and high CO2-brine IFT as the most suitable condition to maintain the high capillarity. The study demonstrates that the highly stable, freely soluble, easy detectable, scalable, and economically viable CNDs has the potency to enhance the containment security of CO2 in carbonate formation.
DOI
10.1016/j.fuel.2023.129404
Access Rights
free_to_read
Comments
Sakthivel, S., Yekeen, N., Theravalappil, R., & Al-Yaseri, A. (2024). Influence of carbon nanodots on the carbonate/CO2/brine wettability and CO2-brine interfacial tension: Implications for CO2 geo-storage. Fuel, 355, article 129404. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fuel.2023.129404