Micro-CT images of a heterogeneous Mt. Simon sandstone sample

The sample porous medium is from Mt. Simon sandstone at a depth of 6700 feet. The formation is located at verification well number 2 of a study site in Decatur, Illinois where Illinois State Geological Survey carried out a pilot injection study to better understand the feasibility of full-scale carbon capture and storage (Finley, 2014). A core plug from the formation was scanned by micro-CT imaging technique at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) of the U.S. Department of Energy, which produced a series of grey-scale scans with a voxel size of 2.80 microns. A series of image processing steps were taken in Fiji to filter and smooth images in order to distinguish void space from the solid grains via a thresholding algorithm. The outcome is a segmented 1200^3 voxels sample with a physical size of 3.36^3 mm^3 that is used in a study of the morphology of the sandstone and its heterogeneity, and simulation of single-phase and two-phase flow of CO2 and brine in the formation's three-dimensional images (Kohanpur et al., 2019).

References:
[1] Finley, Robert J. "An overview of the Illinois Basin–Decatur project." Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology 4.5 (2014): 571-579.
[2] Kohanpur, Amir H., et al. "Two-phase flow of CO2-brine in a heterogeneous sandstone: Characterization of the rock and comparison of the lattice-Boltzmann, pore-network, and direct numerical simulation methods." Advances in Water Resources (2019): 103469.