Geoelectrical monitoring of dissolution and precipitation reactions in a saturated calcareous porous medium

Precipitation and dissolution are prime processes in carbonate rocks and being able to monitor them is a major deal of reservoir exploitation for geo-resources (water, gas) or geological storage (CO₂, H₂, waste). Geophysics can be used to monitor these processes non-intrusively and at low cost. Among the existing techniques, we used two electrical methods to monitor the reactivity of a synthetic calcareous porous medium: self-potential (SP) and spectral induced polarization (SIP). SP is a passive technique that consists in measuring the electrical field as it is affected by water fluxes and concentration gradients through electrokinetic and electrochemical couplings. SIP is an active method that provides the electrical conductivity and the chargeability of a porous medium in a low frequency range (mHz to kHz). We carried out a two months laboratory experiment to monitor the geoelectrical signals generated by chemical variations in a synthetic medium composed of pure calcite grains. Three different solutions were injected to alternatively dissolve or precipitate calcite in the sample. The sample is equipped with four aligned non-polarizable Ag/AgCl electrodes in order to geoelectrically monitor the fluid percolation and the ionic concentration gradients changes through the medium. Moreover, we conducted chemical analyses of the downstream fluid to monitor its ionic composition. We made a 1D reactive-transport simulation with the software CrunchFlow to get the concentration gradients of all dissolved ions along the column. Following a theoretical framework, we used a physically based analytical model to relate our electrical signals to ionic concentrations of a multicomponent electrolyte. We find that dissolution and precipitation generate measurable geoelectrical signals because of chemical reactions and ions substitutions. These findings open the possibility to better understand geoelectrical signals in natural media and possibly use them to monitor in situ reactivity.