Pore Habit of Gas in Gassy Sediments

Type Article
Date 2021-05
Language English
Author(s) Terzariol MarcoORCID1, Sultan NabilORCID1, Apprioual Ronan1, Garziglia SebastienORCID1
Affiliation(s) 1 : REM‐GM IFREMER Plouzane29280, France
Source Journal Of Geophysical Research-solid Earth (2169-9313) (American Geophysical Union (AGU)), 2021-05 , Vol. 126 , N. 5 , P. e2020JB021511 (16p.)
DOI 10.1029/2020JB021511
WOS© Times Cited 8
Keyword(s) Degassing, fracture, gas exsolution, gassy sediments, pore invasive, revised soil classification
Abstract

Gas bubbles are widespread in seafloors and lakebeds and typically found in shallow and fine‐grained sediments. Sediment properties control gas nucleation and gas migration. Gas migration and pathways have been studied mostly in clean coarse particles or fine‐grained matrices. Nevertheless, both cases show very distinct geo‐behaviors. Pore habit is defined by the counteracting effects of effective stress and pore‐throat‐dependent capillary pressure. In this article, we explore gas nucleation by CO2 gas exsolution and its consequent gas‐driven fractures (open‐mode discontinuities) or pore invasion in binary sediments as a function of fines content. We conducted physical test analogies for different fines content subjected to gas exsolution. Our results highlight that the pore habit of gas in gassy sediments depends on its capability to invade a neighboring pore (capillarity) and burial depth (effective stress). We show that the load dominant fraction in binary soils can be used to estimate the dominant pore throat size. We then proposed a robust methodology to predict the pore habit of gassy sediments from its properties as defined in recent developments in soil behavior and characterization. Finally, we applied it to a real case offshore Vancouver Island.

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