(772a) Geologic Storage of Carbon Dioxide in the Central Plains of North America

The capture and geologic storage of carbon dioxide (CO₂) has been identified as one strategy for reducing CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere from anthropogenic sources such as coal-fired power plants, natural gas-processing plants, and other industrial facilities. Over the past 15 years, the deployment of this strategy in the central plains of North America has been extensively investigated by the Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) of the University of North Dakota. Over this period, the EERC has conducted research to assist the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in achieving four goals of its Carbon Storage Research and Development Program, which have been established to support the scale-up and widespread deployment of this CO₂ management strategy:

1. Develop and validate technologies to ensure 99% storage permanence.

2. Develop technologies to improve reservoir storage efficiency while ensuring containment effectiveness.

3. Support industry’s ability to predict CO₂ storage capacity in geologic formations to within ±30%.

4. Develop best practices for monitoring, verification, and accounting (MVA) and assessment; site screening, selection, and initial characterization; public outreach; well management activities; and risk analysis and simulation.

A portfolio of research and demonstration projects is currently in progress at the EERC to provide this technical assistance to DOE. The three primary initiatives of this portfolio are the Plains CO₂ Reduction (PCOR) Partnership Program, the Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise (CarbonSAFE) project, and the brine extraction and storage test (BEST) project. The PCOR Partnership Program, one of the seven Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships established across the United States by the DOE National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), has been the centerpiece of this research effort since 2003. The PCOR Partnership region encompasses the central plains of North America and comprises four Canadian provinces and nine states within the continental United States. The CarbonSAFE and BEST initiatives are more recent, complementary projects to the PCOR Partnership Program and are addressing topics that will promote the commercial deployment of the geologic storage of CO₂.

This presentation will provide an overview of research being conducted as part of these three integrated research initiatives. A regional profile of CO₂ sources and potential CO₂ storage locations has been produced, and several large-scale projects to assess the viability of this strategy to effectively and safely store CO₂ in the subsurface have been or are being conducted. With regard to the latter, the EERC is conducting pre-feasibility and feasibility studies as well as large-scale field tests at demonstration and commercial facilities to investigate both the dedicated storage of CO₂ in deep saline aquifers and the associated storage of CO₂ during CO₂ enhanced oil recovery (CO₂ EOR) operations. These projects are targeting the storage of CO₂ from multiple sources including shale gas processing, natural gas processing, coal gasification, and coal-fired power production; they are also investigating the extraction of formation brines as a means of managing reservoir pressure, minimizing the footprint of injected fluids, and improving overall injection performance during CO₂ injection. The specific projects that will be highlighted during this presentation, which geographically include the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta and the states of North Dakota, Montana, and Nebraska, are as follows:

PCOR Partnership Program Demonstration Tests:

• Commercial CO₂ injection (Bell Creek, Montana) – Modeling, simulation and monitoring of the associated storage of over 3MM tonnes of CO₂ from natural gas-processing facilities in Wyoming at a CO₂ EOR operation in Bell Creek, Montana.

• Commercial CO₂ injection (Alberta) – Assessment of CO₂ storage in carbonate pinnacle reefs of the Zama oil field during an acid gas EOR project.

• Feasibility study (Fort Nelson, British Columbia) – Storage of an acid comprised of CO₂ and hydrogen sulfide (H₂S) gas from a shale gas-processing facility in a deep saline aquifer.

CarbonSAFE Studies:

• Pre-feasibility study (Nebraska) – Initial investigation directed toward the development of a dedicated CO₂ storage complex capable of storing 50+ million metric tons captured from a pulverized coal electric generating unit) in western Nebraska.

• Feasibility study (Central North Dakota) – Development of a dedicated CO₂ storage complex capable of storing 50+ million metric tons of CO₂ captured at coal-fired energy facilities in central North Dakota should a business case for CO₂ storage emerge.

BEST Project:

• Active reservoir management field demonstration (northwestern North Dakota) – this project will drill two new wells at a commercial saltwater disposal facility in order to demonstrate and evaluate pressure management strategies applicable to future CO₂ geological storage projects.

• As part of the demonstration, an extracted water treatment technology test bed is being constructed to enable technology providers to further develop, demonstrate, and advance extracted and produced water treatment technologies that can meaningfully reduce brine disposal volumes, provide an alternate source of water, and/or produce salable products.