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Improving Basalt Wettability To De-Risk Co2 Geo-Storage In Basaltic Formations, Stefan Iglauer, Ahmed Al-Yaseri

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

CO₂ geo-storage in basaltic formations has recently been identified as a viable option to rapidly dispose large quantities of CO₂, hence mitigating anthropogenic CO₂ emissions. However, it has been shown that basalt is weakly water-wet or intermediate-wet at typical storage conditions, which reduces capillary trapping capacities and increases lateral and vertical spreading of the CO₂ plume; and these effects increase project risk. We thus propose here to prime basalt surfaces with anionic surfactant (here we used sodium dodecyl benzene sulfonate), and demonstrate that such priming is highly efficient, and renders the basalt completely water-wet even …