Underground Monitoring of Carbon Storage Site Begins in Miss.

September 4, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS

This research effort will provide valuable insight into both the requirements of the instrumentation necessary to ensure the safe storage of CO2 underground and the geological formations that are expected to permanently store greenhouse gas in the Southeast U.S., said DOE.

The DOE SECARB project began injecting CO2 at a depth of 10,300 feet for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) at the Cranfield oilfield in Mississippi.

The CO2 is naturally occurring and is trapped in the subsurface formation known as the Jackson Dome. Transported by pipeline to the injection site, the CO2 will be injected at the rate of 250,000 to 500,000 metric tons per year over the next several years.

The target geological formation known as the lower Tuscaloosa Formation is representative of the high quality CO2 storage options that exist throughout the Gulf Coast region, said DOE.

Innovative real-time monitoring of the CO2 injection is being led by the Gulf Coast Carbon Center at the Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas at Austin.

Monitoring consists of downhole pressure and temperature measurements within both the injection interval and a monitoring interval 400 feet above. Technical focus areas will include:

• Verifying CO2 retention in the injection zone.
• Quantifying storage capacity.
• Quantifying near- and far-field pressure response to injection.

The permanence of storage in this formation is well documented by oil and gas that has been trapped for long time periods. A conservative estimate by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has projected the storage capacity for the Tuscaloosa Formation at 10 billion metric tons.

Initiated in 2003, the DOE Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership Program, managed by the DOE Office of Fossil Energy National Energy Technology Laboratory, includes seven partnering regions established to determine the best approaches for capturing and permanently storing CO2.

The partnerships are made up of state agencies, universities, private companies and nonprofit organizations that form the core of a nationwide network helping to establish the most suitable technologies, regulations and infrastructure needs for large scale carbon capture and storage, said DOE.

SECARB represents 13 southeastern states (Ala., Ark., Fla., Ga., Ky., La., Miss., N.C., S.C., Tenn., Texas, Va. and W.Va.) and more than 100 partners and stakeholders. The Cranfield test is one of four pilot tests that the partnership is sponsoring for the validation phase of the project. In this phase, multiple sequestration sites and technologies are being validated in preparation for large scale injection that will occur in the deployment phase.

Source: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy.