Characterization of CO₂ storage properties using core analysis techniques and thin section data

Carbon dioxide capture and sequestration in saline aquifers is considered one of the most important technologies for short and medium term climate change mitigation. There are many challenges for wide scale deployment of sequestration, including developing a sufficiently accurate fundamental understanding of the processes which govern the movement of supercritical CO₂ in saline aquifers. A method for testing our understanding of the underlying physics is to conduct numerical simulations intended to replicate a multiphase flow experiment in which CO₂ is injected into a brine saturated rock core. This paper focuses on methods to integrate pore scale rock properties into permeability models of cores subjected to such experiments. We use thin sections to measure pore scale features of rocks, and test correlations that relate permeability to porosity using the Carman-Kozeny equation. Incorporation of these pore scale features into sub-core scale maps of permeability is being used to history match core-scale multi-phase flow experiments.