CO<sub>2</sub>-Soluble Nonionic Surfactants for Enhanced CO<sub>2</sub> Storage via In Situ Foam Generation
Lauren Burrows, Foad Haeri, Deepak Tapriyal, Parth G. Shah, Dustin Crandall, Robert M. Enick, Angela Goodman
Abstract
Geologic carbon storage (GCS) is a rapidly evolving technology with the potential to reduce the environmental impact of fossil fuel usage. Saline aquifers, which comprise a sandstone matrix with brine contained in the pores, make up much of the pore space available for CO 2 storage in the United States. When CO 2 is injected in saline aquifers, however, capillary fingering occurs, and only a small percentage of the pore space is filled with CO 2 . This fingering effect is due to the low viscosity of CO 2, which is roughly ten times less viscous than brine. To address this problem, we tested the ability of inexpensive, commercially available nonionic surfactants to be dissolved in injected CO 2 and increase the apparent viscosity of CO 2 by generating CO 2 -in-water foams in situ. We focused our study on nonionic tridecyl ethoxylate surfactants with the number of ethoxylate groups ranging from 11 to 18 (TDA-11, TDA-13, TDA-15, TDA-18). These surfactants exhibited sufficient CO 2 -solubility and were shown to reduce the CO 2 -brine interfacial tension (IFT), stabilize bulk CO 2 -in-brine foams, and reduce the mobility of CO 2 during core floods of CO 2 in brine-saturated Berea sandstone. The surfactants did not alter the wettability of the Berea sandstone. Modeling results showed that in a reservoir field injection scenario, the presence of TDA-11 (0.1 wt %) increased both the CO 2 storage resource and storage efficiency by 17%. Simulations also showed that the lateral extension area of the plume was reduced by 23% and that CO 2 saturation within the plume increased by 26%.