Rock Permeability Effect on Residual CO2 Trapping Efficiency in Carbonate Formations

The degree of success of CO2 storage depends on many factors that control the safety and efficiency of such projects. Formation permeability is considered one of the main factors affecting this promising technique (Zhang & Arif, 2024). Specifically, it controls the degree of CO2 trapped by residual trapping, one of the main trapping mechanisms (Raza et al, 2016). Therefore, the need to provide deeper insights on how the latter can affect CO2 storage is highly desired. The scope of this study is to explore experimentally the effect of rock properties, particularly the permeability on CO2 residual trapping efficiency in carbonate/brine/CO2 geo-systems. After detecting a great discrepancy in literature regarding the effect of permeability in carbonate/CO2/brine system, and due to the scarcity in experiments and data sets generated in this research area, further experiments are needed to contribute to the establishment of well-defined trends of residual CO2 saturation behavior. This study presents for the first time an extensive investigation on residual trapping efficiency affected by rock properties in limestone reservoirs.