Elemental and isotopic fractionation of noble gases in gas and oil under reservoir conditions: Impact of thermodiffusion⋆.

Abstract

Noble gases, and the way they fractionate, is a promising approach to better constrain origin, migration and initial state distributions of fluids in gas and oil reservoirs. Thermodiffusion, is one of the phenomena that may lead to isotope and elemental fractionation of noble gases. However, this effect, assumed to be small, has not been quantified, nor measured, in oil and gas under reservoir conditions. Thus, in this work, molecular dynamics simulations have been performed to compute the thermal diffusion factors of noble gases, in a dense gas (methane) and in an oil (n-hexane) under high pressures. Interestingly, it has been found that thermal diffusion factors, associated to both isotopic (36Ar, 40Ar) and elemental fractionations of noble gases (4He, 20Ne, 40Ar, 84Kr and 131Xe) in gas and oil, could be expressed as linear functions of the reduced masses. Regarding the amplitude of the phenomena, it has been found that, in a stationary 1D oil or gas fluid column, thermodiffusion due to a typical geothermal gradient has an impact on noble gas isotopic and elemental fractionation which is of the same order of magnitude than gravity segregation, but opposite in sign. In addition, the relative impact of thermodiffusion on isotopic and elemental fractionations depends on the fluid type which is another interesting feature. Thus, these first numerical results on isotopic and elemental fractionation of noble gases by thermodiffusion in simple pure gas and oil emphasize their interest as natural tracers that could be used to improve the pre-exploitation description of oil and gas reservoirs.