Field measurement of residual carbon dioxide saturation using reactive ester tracers

Abstract

As part of the CO2CRC Otway Residual Saturation and Dissolution Test, a series of field tests were conducted at their project site in Victoria, Australia, with the primary goal of developing and assessing methods for quantifying residual CO2 saturation in a saline aquifer. This paper reports the outcome of one of these tests, a single-well “push–pull” tracer test that uses novel reactive esters (i.e., propylene glycol diacetate, triacetin and tripropionin). For this tracer test, the ester is injected (pushed) into the reservoir where residual saturation has been established using CO2, and maintained by pushing with CO2 saturated water (to prevent changes in saturation due to CO2 dissolution). The ester is partially hydrolysed by the formation water to yield multiple compounds (i.e., the corresponding alcohol and acid generated from the ester). During water production (pull) from the same well, these compounds will partition differentially between the residual supercritical carbon dioxide phase and water phase, leading to chromatographic separation. By modelling the concentration profiles of these tracers in production water samples and using the experimentally determined partition coefficients, we generate two consistent residual saturation estimates using two separate modelling techniques, one a simple finite difference simulation of the tracer velocity field and the other a standard multiphase simulation code.