--> ABSTRACT: Oil Field Technology Maybe Key to DNAPL Delineation, by Jay Lehr; #91020 (1995).

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Oil Field Technology Maybe Key to DNAPL Delineation

Jay Lehr

The problem of finding Dense Non Aqueous Phase Liquids which have found there way into our around water, seems to be due to the density and viscosity of solvents involved and to the heterogeneity of typical aquifer systems. In granular aquifers DNAPLS form vertical fingers held by capillary forces and horizontal pools which may flow into a well. Hydrogeologists seem incapable of developing methods to locate these oily, smelly liquids fifty feet beneath our feet at a time when we can see rocks and ice hit the backside of Jupiter some 400 million miles away. But the oil patch developed methods of using tracers to measure the volume of oil (residual oil saturation) in porous rock over 20 years ago. In the oil patch, engineers inject organic chemical tracers into oil fields a ter water flooding and just prior to tertiary recovery operations. These tracers are pumped down a well into the reservoir where they react with the formation water and with the oil. By pumping back the tracer solutions the petroleum engineers are able to calculate the volume of oil around the well.

Hydrogeologists using this same concept can now inject tracers into one well, pump them through the aquifer during which they react with DNAPL and then extract them from one or more recovery wells. The volume of the DNAPL between the wells can be figured out at the recovery well from the chromatographic separation of these tracers by their interaction wit the DNAPL.

AAPG Search and Discovery Article #91020©1995 AAPG Annual Convention, Houston, Texas, May 5-8, 1995