Water uptake assessment of brine contaminated soils using low-field nuclear magnetic resonance

The soil environment in the vicinity of petroleum industry activities is often contaminated with petroleum hydrocarbons and formation brine. As part of environmental clean-up procedures, the soil must first be treated to remove the salinity and then bioremediated to remove the hydrocarbons. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is currently used in well-logging tools for analysis of fluids within a reservoir. The focus of this research is to use low field NMR to study the affects of brine contaminated soils. There are several objectives to this project: to understand the phenomenon of fluid uptake in soils over time, to correlate the mechanisms of fluid uptake to soil characteristics, and to show that NMR can assess wetting phenomena in soil quantitatively and can be used as a standard measurement tool.