Temperature-responsive smart tracers for field-measurement of inter-well thermal evolution: Heterogeneous kinetics and field demonstration

•Reaction half-lives in homogeneous conditions are two to three orders of magnitude larger than in heterogeneous conditions.•Field demonstrated revealed that estimated inter-well reservoir temperatures are within 0 to 5 °C of the "true" values.•Temperature-responsive smart tracers enable advanced warning of premature thermal breakthrough. Temperature-responsive smart tracers enable advanced warning of a “premature thermal breakthrough” and may therefore improve reservoir management and reduce financial risk. A successful calculation of inter-well fluid temperatures requires that temperature-dependent kinetics are known, which typically result from homogeneous batch reactor experiments. However, recent meso-scale field experiments at the Altona Field Laboratory involving fluid flow in a discretely-fractured reservoir suggest that silica-fluid interfaces may accelerate hydrolysis kinetics. Here, the Arrhenius parameters of phenyl acetate hydrolysis are investigated under heterogeneous reaction conditions in packed-bed column experiments. The breakthrough curve of the reaction product is compared to an inert reference tracer (carbon-cored nanoparticles). Temperatures experienced during field testing ranging from 10 to 40 ℃ were studied using a phosphate buffer solution to maintain a near-neutral pH, as found in the reservoir. The empirically-determined pre-exponential factor and activation energy values are subsequently used in a first-order kinetic model to improve calculations of effective reservoir temperatures for these meso-scale field tests. The results suggest that hydrolysis reactions can directly monitor inter-well reservoir temperatures, but only if the influence of solid-fluid interactions are carefully accounted for.