Challenges in Coupling Acidity and Salinity Transport in Porous Media

Salinity is an increasingly prescient issue in reactive transport, from low salinity water flooding to fracking brine leakage. Of primary concern is the effect of salinity on surface chemistry. Transport and batch experiments show a strong coupling of salinity and acidity through chemical interactions at the mineral-liquid interface. This coupling is ascribed to the combined effects of ionic strength on electrostatic behavior of the interface and competitive sorption between protons and other cations for binding sites on the surface. The effect of these mechanisms is well studied in batch settings and readily describes observed behavior. In contrast, the transport literature is sparse, primarily applied to synthetic materials, and offers only qualitative agreement with observations. To address, this gap in knowledge, we conduct a suite of column flood experiments through silica sand, systematically varying salinity and acidity conditions. Experiments are compared to a reactive transport model incorporating the proposed coupling mechanisms. The results highlight the difficulty in applying such models to realistic media under both basic and acidic conditions with a single set of parameters. The analysis and experimental results show the observed error is the result of electrostatic assumptions within the surface chemistry model and provide a strong constraint on further model development.