(559b) National Energy Technology Laboratory’s National Risk Assessment Partnership (NRAP): Efforts to Reduce Risk and Ensure Successful Storage

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) and the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) implement the Carbon Storage Program, which supports research and development of technologies to enable safe, cost-effective, and secure containment of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in geologic storage reservoirs. One of the key methods for accomplishing this is to assess and quantify the potential risks associated with the highly complex storage process. The National Risk Assessment Partnership (NRAP), led by NETL, was created to broadly support the Carbon Storage Program’s efforts to assess risk at storage sites by integrating expertise and resources from five DOE national laboratories: NETL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. NRAP utilizes expertise from these laboratories to develop, improve, test, and validate tools and methods; perform foundational experiments; and analyze results and data to address risk and the uncertainty inherent in geologic CO₂ storage. NRAP has developed an opensource toolset to quantify and reduce the risk related to the migration of CO₂ or brine from the storage reservoir, and to quantify and reduce the risk of negative geomechanical impacts due to injection of CO₂. Ongoing work includes efforts to characterize and reduce risk and inform decision making throughout the entire life-cycle of a CO₂ storage project with particular emphasis on the characterization and permitting phases. The ultimate goal of this effort is to help quantify and reduce the risk of CO₂ releases to the atmosphere and accelerate the viability and potential widespread deployment of carbon storage technologies. An overview of the results of the NRAP effort to date, the current research and development, and the future direction of the project will be discussed.