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Does the nucleation of clay minerals control the rate of diagenesis in sandstones?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Mark Wilkinson
Mark Wilkinson*
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh, Grant Institute, James Hutton Road, Edinburgh EH9 3FE, UK
*
E-mail: Mark.Wilkinson@ed.ac.uk
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Abstract

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Nucleation is much more important for clay minerals than for other authigenic cements as clay crystals are very small, so that a very large number of clay crystals must be nucleated. The role of this difficult kinetic step in the diagenesis of sandstones has not been considered adequately as a ratedetermining process. The relationship between pore-fluid supersaturation and the rate of nucleation of a mineral is very different from the relationship between supersaturation and the rate of crystal enlargement; thus the two processes will act at very different rates. A diagenetic model that predicts claymineral formation but omits the nucleation stage may make unreliable predictions. This may account partially for the discrepancy between numerical simulations of CO2 injection that predict high degrees of reaction between the CO2 and the host rock, and the results of studies of natural analogues that have much lower degrees of reaction.

Keywords

nucleationclay mineraldiagenesis
Type
Research Article
Information
Clay Minerals , Volume 50 , Issue 3 , August 2015 , pp. 275 - 281
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
Copyright © The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2015 This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © The Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2015

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