Surface and Subsurface Geochemical Monitoring of an EOR-CO

This paper presents a surface and subsurface geochemical survey of the Buracica EOR-CO2 field onshore Brazil. We adopted a methodology coupling the stable isotopes of carbon with noble gases to investigate the adequacy of geochemical monitoring to track deep fluid leakage at the surface. Three campaigns of CO2 flux and concentration in soils were performed to understand the CO2 variability across the field. The distribution of the CO2 soil contents between 0.8 and 14% is in great part controlled by the properties of the soil, with a first-order topographic dependency. These results, together with a δ13CCO2 between –15 and –23‰, suggest that the bulk of the soil CO2 flux is biological. The gas injected and produced at numerous wells across the field showed a great spatial and somewhat temporal heterogeneity with respect to molecular, δ13CCO2 and noble gas compositions. This heterogeneity is a consequence of the EOR-induced sweeping of the petroleum fluids by the injected CO2, producing a heterogeneous mixing controlled by the production scheme and the distribution in reservoir permeability. In light of the δ13CCO2 found in the reservoir, the stable isotopic composition of carbon was insufficient to track CO2 leaks at the surface. We demonstrate how noble gases may be powerful leak discriminators, even for CO2 abundances in soils in the bottom range of the biological baseline (~1%). The results presented in this study show the potential of geochemical monitoring techniques, involving stable isotopes and noble gases at the reservoir and soil levels, for tracing CO2 in CCS projects