Overview of Potential Carbon Storage Complexes in the Offshore United States Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic

Estimates of regional geologic storage resource are key to advancing the widespread deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS). This paper consolidates the results of several recent studies to estimate the storage resource on the continental shelf off the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States. Much of the recent work has been carried out through a series of Offshore Resource Assessment Projects supported by $13.8M from the U.S. DOE FE Carbon Storage Program. Results of five projects are discussed, which used a variety of methodologies and covered different geologic settings offshore of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic coasts. Sediments beneath the Gulf of Mexico represent a vast storage resource in oil and gas reservoirs and saline formations, and resource estimates benefit from extensive oil and gas exploration and development data. Using production data, it is estimated that there is 20GT of storage in just the oil and gas reservoirs. Including saline formations, analysis of seismic data and well data indicates many tens of gigatonnes, or more, storage resource is available in the Gulf. Storage resource estimates are less well defined off the Atlantic coast due to lack of data. Nonetheless, improved stratigraphic models, guided by biostratigraphy, and combined with available seismic data indicate many tens of gigatonnes, or more, of storage resource is also available throughout a large area studied from New York to northern Florida.