Carbon storage in offshore reservoirs: high-grading opportunities from existing data

Jobe

zanejobe@mines.edu

Brandon Dugan

dugan@mines.edu

The global market for carbon storage and utilization is rapidly growing to mitigate the effects of anthropogenic carbon emissions. Offshore reservoirs are very attractive for large-scale carbon storage for reasons both technical (large, well-connected pore volumes, accurate subsurface imaging) and non-technical (e.g., less impact on populations, ‘not in my backyard’). While the depletion and pressure-maintenance of offshore reservoirs are relatively well understood, the addition of CO2 into these depleted reservoirs and the potential impacts on reservoir-seal dynamics has not been appropriately characterized nor risked. Enhanced oil-recovery methods using CO2 will play a key part in making carbon storage economical in offshore reservoirs in the near future, but carbon storage will eventually transition to large saline reservoirs readily available in the offshore realm. Your focus would be to collect, integrate, and analyze open-source data from the Gulf of Mexico to predict the best conditions and locations for future carbon storage sites using enhanced oil recovery. Specifically, you would focus on field and well locations, pore volumes, production rates, decline curves, and subsurface pressure data to help high-grade locations for carbon storage.

By design, this project is collaborative, and hopes to bring together disparate datasets from different domains to provide reasonable recommendations for future carbon storage sites. The students would meet at least twice a month to work on the project, sharing data and code through Dropbox/OneDrive. Faculty mentors will schedule regular meetings with the students, and will be available to meet on an ad-hoc basis as well.

Grand Challenge: Develop carbon sequestration methods

https://payneinstitute.mines.edu/integrated-ccus-initiative/ https://www.netl.doe.gov/sites/default/files/netl-file/co2_eor_primer.pdf https://www.iea.org/commentaries/can-co2-eor-really-provide-carbon-negative-oil https://www.energy.gov/fe/science-innovation/oil-gas-research/enhanced-oil-recovery

Zane Jobe zanejobe@mines.edu Brandon Dugan dugan@mines.edu Lesli Wood lwood@mines.edu