The Electrical Conductivity of CO2-Bearing Pore Waters at Elevated Pressure and Temperature: A Laboratory Study and Its Implications in CO2 Storage Monitoring and Leakage Detection

douglas holtz-eakin, harvey s. rosen;

The electrical rock conductivity is a sensitive indicator for carbon dioxide (CO2) injection and migration processes. For a reliable balancing of the free CO2 in pore space with petrophysical models such as Archie’s law or for the detection of migrating CO2, detailed knowledge of the pore water conductivity during interaction with CO2 is essential but not available yet. Contrary to common assumptions, pore water conductivity cannot be assumed constant since CO2 is a
reactive gas that dissolves into the pore water in large amounts and provides additional charge carriers due to the dissociation of carbonic acid. We consequently carried out systematic laboratory experiments to quantify and analyse the changes in saline pore water conductivity
caused by CO2 at thermodynamic equilibrium. Electrical conductivity is measured on pore water samples for pressures up to 30 MPa and temperatures up to 80 ◦C. The parameter range covers the gaseous, liquid and supercritical state of the CO2 involved. Pore water salinities
from 0.006 up to 57.27 g L−1 sodium chloride were investigated as well as selective other ion species. At the same time, the CO2 concentration in the salt solution was determined by a wet-chemical procedure. A two-regime behaviour appears: for small salinities, we observe an increase of up to more than factor 3 in the electrical pore water conductivity, which strongly depends on the solution salinity (low-salinity regime). This is an expected behaviour, since the additional ions originating from the dissociation of carbonic acid positively contribute to the solution conductivity. However, when increasing salinities are considered this effect is completely diminished. For highly saline solutions, the increased mutual impeding causes the mobility of all ions to decrease, which may result in a significant reduction of conductivity by up to 15 per cent despite the added CO2 (high-salinity regime). We present the data set covering the pressure, temperature, salinity and ion species dependence of the CO2 effect. Furthermore, the observations are analysed and predicted with a semi-analytical formulation for the electrical pore water conductivity taking into account the species’ interactions. For the
applicability of our results in practice of exploration and monitoring, we additionally provide a purely empirical formulation to compute the impact of CO2 on pore water conductivity at equilibrium which only requires the input of pressure, temperature and salinity information.