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Experimental investigation of CO2 residual trapping in naturally water-wet and artificially tailored oil-wet limestones: Implications for geological CO2 storage
Advances in Geo-Energy Research 2025, 17(1): 43-55
Published: 19 June 2025
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The wetting behavior of rock/CO2/brine systems highly impacts the fluid distribution at the pore-scale and multiphase flow at the macroscale and is considered a key parameter controlling the CO2 residual trapping in geological storage. The effect of wettability on residual trapping is, however, still uncertain as the current literature suggests high discrepancies among the published datasets. Moreover, the dataset for residual trapping observations for non water-wet carbonate rocks is relatively scarce; none of the published studies investigated this aspect in CO2-wet limestones. Thus, a series of core-flooding experiments was conducted at reservoir conditions for three limestone samples having different wettability states, water-wet, intermediate wet, and CO2-wet. Wettability alteration of sister rocks was achieved using stearic acid to mimic the wettability alteration in saline aquifers due to the interaction with natural organic compounds. Notably, increasing the hydrophobicity of limestone tends to decrease CO2 residual trapping efficiency 19% and 37% when the initial water-wetting state shifts to intermediate-wet and CO2-wet, respectively. This is attributed to the fluid distribution at the pore scale, in particular the wetting layers, and its effect on the CO2/brine displacement. In case of CO2-wet rocks, macroscopic CO2-wetting layers act as flow paths, which reduces the residual CO2 saturation from 29% (water-wet) to 8%. These findings advocate water-wet rocks as better candidates for CO2 residual trapping and provide insights into residual trapping-rock wettability correlation pertinent to CO2 geo-storage.

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