DURABILITY OF WELL CEMENTS: CORROSION BY CARBONIC ACID

Abstract

With an increased focus on how people affect the climate, interest has grown in the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. Subsurface carbon sequestration in abandoned petroleum fields may represent a chance to reduce CO2 emissions. In order to understand how CO2 may escape from the storage formation back to the atmosphere through abandoned wells, a set of four experiments was conducted. The experiments looked at how well cements reacted to carbonated brines at 20 and 50C at pH 2.4 and 3.7. The results showed severe degradation to samples made from Class H well cement, the degradation occurring over the course of 31 days.