Dependence of clay wettability on gas density
Abstract
Understanding wettability of clay minerals is crucial in assessing primary migration of hydrocarbon and evaluating CO2 storage capacities and containment security. In spite of recent efforts, there is considerable uncertainty of experimental data and theoretical predictions are lacking. We, therefore, developed new correlations to predict the advancing and receding contact angles of three different clay minerals (i.e., montmorillonite, Illite and kaolinite) as a function of gas density. To do so, we first measured clay minerals advancing and receding contact angles for helium, nitrogen, argon and carbon dioxide/brine systems at various pressures (5, 10, 15 and 20 MPa) and a constant temperature of 333 K. The statistical analysis shows that the developed correlations are capable of predicting the contact angles of the three clay minerals with very high accuracy (i.e., R > 0.95, for all the newly developed correlations). We thus conclude that the wettability of these clay minerals can be computed from knowledge of the gas densities, using these new empirical correlations. This work has important implications for improving wettability predictions, and thus reducing risks related to subsurface operations, such as CO2 storage or hydrocarbon recovery. © 2021 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
RAS ID
38857
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
2021
Volume
11
Issue
5
Funding Information
LPDP-Indonesia endowment fund for education
Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Indonesia
School
School of Engineering / Centre for Sustainable Energy and Resources
Copyright
subscription content
Publisher
Wiley
Comments
Fauziah, C. A., Al‐Yaseri, A. Z., Al‐Khdheeawi, E. A., Feng, R., Lagat, C., Roshan, H., . . . Barifcani, A. (2021). Dependence of clay wettability on gas density. Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology, 11(5), 1066-1075.
https://doi.org/10.1002/ghg.2118