Reactivity of Mount Simon Sandstone and the Eau Claire Shale Under CO2 Storage Conditions

The Mount Simon sandstone and Eau Claire shale formations are target storage and cap rock formations for the Illinois Basin Decatur Geologic Carbon Sequestration Project. We reacted rock samples with brine and supercritical CO2 at 51 degrees C and 19.5 MPa to access the reactivity of these formations at storage conditions and to address the applicability of using published kinetic and thermodynamic constants to predict geochemical alteration that may occur during storage by quantifying parameter uncertainty against experimental data. Incongruent dissolution of iron-rich clays and formation of secondary clays and amorphous silica will dominate geochemical alterations at this CO2 storage site in CO2-rich brines. The surrogate iron-rich clay in the model required significant adjustments to its thermodynamic constants and inclusion of incongruent reaction terms to capture the change in solution composition under acid CO2 conditions. This result emphasizes the need for experiments that constrain the conceptual geochemical model, calibrate mean parameter values, and quantify parameter uncertainty in reactive-transport simulations that will be used to estimate long-term CO2 trapping mechanisms and changes in porosity and permeability.