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Tuesday, 17 September, 2024 / Edition 25

“Adsorption” is a bit of a dirty word to geoscientists in oil and gas, which is funny given we’ll bust out words like “cleavage” without batting an eye. This week, I dive into how one company is using adsorption for the greater good. I will also take a look at cutting-edge research at Coso geothermal field and how production might impact the behavior of local faults. Let’s dive in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

One Industry’s Junk is Another Industry’s Treasure

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Adsorption in our geoscience neck of the woods can be an indication of fluid/solid interaction gone wrong, clogged pores, and generally negative impacts on production. To one company, however, air adsorption is part of the path to a greener future.

Catch up fast: Using adsorption isn’t new or uncommon across the energy sector and beyond. Here are some everyday examples:

• Activated (active) charcoal has small, low-volume pores that greatly increase the surface area available for adsorption and is used in methane and hydrogen storage, air purification, decaffeination (especially of interest to your masochistic mostly decaf-drinking author), water purification, and a myriad of other applications.

• Silica gel—those annoying packets I most commonly encounter in packaged beef jerky—act as a desiccant to keep things dry and fresh.

• Zeolites, which can be natural or synthetic, are polar in nature, and release water at high temperatures. These are found in non-clumping cat litter, concrete and asphalt production, and more.

Reclaimed Minerals, Inc. seeks to use adsorption to more efficiently extract high-purity grade iodine, lithium, and bromine, though most of its focus seems to be on iodine.

Reclaimed Minerals’ website was somewhat sparse in terms of the nitty-gritty details of what it is doing—which is understandable given where the company seems to be in its business life—but the tidbits the site did give look promising!

• The conventional process of iodine extraction relies primarily on equipment constructed with titanium vessels imported from abroad.

• Iodine Star Inc, a partner with Reclaimed Minerals, has introduced a game-changing alternative that employs basalt-reinforced vessels, presenting a more affordable and domestically manufacturable solution.

• Once the formation water is pulled from the subsurface, the company uses separators to concentrate the iodine in the brine, then uses adsorption processes to separate it from the brine, and then from the air.

• Artificial lift, something our industry is familiar with, is also an avenue Reclaimed Minerals is exploring to extract iodine.

Geoscientists have a few roles to play from what I can tell, including (but not limited to) finding good brine stock and subsurface places to store fluids once extraction is complete.

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Production’s Effect on Fault Lines Near Geothermal Areas

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We all know production impacts stress and pore pressure fields in an oil and gas reservoir immediately, as well as over the long term.

How this happens is still TBD, so it’s no surprise that we don’t quite understand how the same factors play out in geothermal fields either.

What we do know: In oil and gas reservoirs, we know faults can either seal or transmit stress and fluids. Recent research in geothermal fields, however, indicates production can impact and change the nature of these faults.

New study findings:

• Faults that were seismically active before production suddenly went silent after production, indicating production might have stabilized the faults.

• The distance from the production center played a role. Farfield earthquake events were distributed along conjugate NW-SE and SW-NW structures across the main flank, but they clustered in the eastern and western parts of the greater Coso area during production.

• The midfield zone experienced a lack of seismic events and seemed to overlap with a zone of decreasing pore fluid pressure.

The bottom line: We often model reservoir conditions before production, but retroactive and real-time analyses could guide management practices or perhaps even production automation (e.g. choke management). It looks like an avenue ripe for geoscientists to take charge and provide immediate value add!

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✉️ To get in touch with Sarah or suggest a topic for Enspired, send an email to editorial@aapg.org.