Quintessa's geochemical modelling consulting capabilities and experience includes:

Acquisition of geochemical data

• advising on appropriate groundwater and rock sampling locations;
• advising on appropriate methods for sampling, preservation, storage and analysis of waters;
• advising on appropriate methods for sampling, preservation, storage and analysis of rock samples;
• interpretation of porewater data from low-permeability rocks (e.g. squeezed porewater samples from clays, leachates from crystalline rocks) in terms of in-situ porewater compositions;
• assessment of data quality;and
• auditing of laboratory facilities.

Modelling the chemical evolution of engineered materials

• evolution of cements;
• evolution of bentonite;
• corrosion of metals;
• cement-bentonite-metal-water interactions;
• cement-rock-water and bentonite-rock-water interactions;
• evolution of gas from wastes and engineered materials emplaced in sub-surface environments; and
• groundwater quality evaluation, including: simulating the behaviour of inorganic pollutants in groundwater; and advising on chemical remediation methods.

Simulating the evolution of geothermal systems

• high-temperature water-rock reactions;
• formation scaling;
• well scaling;
• chemistry of discharged fluids; and
• chemical interactions during re-injection of evolved fluids.

Palaeohydrogeological interpretation

• interpretation of stable isotopic data (¹⁸O/¹⁶O, ³⁴S/³²S, ¹³C/¹²C, ³⁷Cl etc) in terms of groundwater and solute origins;
• interpretation of radiogenic isotopic data (¹⁴C, ³⁶Cl, ⁸¹Kr, ³H, ³He/⁴He etc) in terms of groundwater residence times ('groundwater dating');
• calculation of recharge temperatures from noble gas data; and
• interpretation of mineralogical information in terms of past chemical conditions (e.g. pH and redox conditions) and groundwater flow patterns.

Thermodynamic database development, verification and testing

• review of thermodynamic data;
• testing and verification of thermodynamic databases;
• addition of thermodynamic data to existing thermodynamic databases; and
• reformatting of thermodynamic databases for different software packages.

Quintessa makes use of the standard geochemical and reactive transport software tools where they are most appropriate, and our in-house QPAC software for reactive transport problems, optionally coupled to thermal and mechanical processes, that are beyond the capability of standard codes.