Agenda 30th June: Storage
11:15 Overview of activities
Updates on activities & projects, focused on the cooperation between Norway and US, Darin Damiani; DOE, Kari-Lise Rørvik; Gassnova (see second half of presentation)
Report from the 5th International Conference on Offshore Geologic Storage, Katherine Romanak
Monitoring CO2 stores: How to achieve a common understanding across nations and regions?
11:50 Discussion on projects – ‘short pitches’ (Moderator Philip Ringrose)
12:25 Storage – industry needs (Coordinated by Philip)
Comments from Storegga, Northern Lights JV, and others?
12:55 General Discussion
Summary of session
The session opened with an update by Darin Damiani on activities and projects where US and Norwegian organizations have collaborated. These are
· Well Integrity Atlas (LLNL/SINTEF)
· Modeling and Simulating Gt-Scale Injection (NORCE/UT Austin)
· CO2CAPII (ISGS/NORSAR)
· ACT Calls 2 and 3 – 10 US/Norway Projects
· US Investment $ 6.5 M (appr. NOK 65 M)
· Norway investment NOK 74 M NOK (appr. $ 7.4 M)
· US Commitment to ACT Call 4 = $5.6M
· CO2 DataShare (FECM/Gassnova)
Darin also presented some recent funding announcements, some of which had been concluded. The main interests of the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) are:
• Repurposing of O&G infrastructure for dedicated CO2 storage (including injection back into reservoirs of natural CO2)
• Conversion of depleted O&G fields to dedicated CO2 storage
• Basin-scale carbon storage resource management
• Expansion of storage characterization to fill data gaps
• Unprecedented opportunity to collect real-world data from commercial scale CCS operations
CarbonSTORE (Carbon Storage Technology and Operations REsearch Facility) is a new initiative that will enable:
• Enhanced data gathering for new technology development.
• Fast tracking emerging technology validation.
• Real-world performance feedback for operational improvements and optimization.
Following Darin, Kari-Lise Rørvik, reported on the CO2DataShare, an important pioneering project in sharing data and knowledge. So far four data sets are available:
• Sleipner CO2 storage project (2020) – 12744 data components downloaded
• Smeaheia formation (2021) – 5875
• Illinois Basin - Decatur Project (2022) – 523
• Johansen formation (2022) – 109
More than 19 000 data components have been downloaded from about 350 organizations from more than 60 countries
Kari-Lise stressed the importance of work like this and continued funding for maintaining the database and keeping it open.
The International Conference on Offshore Geologic Storage has several earlier occasions had its annual meeting in conjunction with the bilateral meetings (or vice versa). So also in 2022. Katherine Romanak, University of Texas, gave a summary of the 5th conference in the series, held in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 19-20 May, 2022. After some historic, a brief update on several projects around the world, the conclusions of the workshop were summarized as follows:
• The growing number of projects since last workshop! Momentum!
• The range of projects, good for others to learn from.
• Some projects planning to use ship for transport and/or injection.
• Good participation by regulators.
• New industry players joining projects.
• Re-use of infrastructure is complex, technically, and legally. There are good examples of the details needed from some projects.
• Can we co-locate activities? Maybe, maybe not.
• Pleased to see use of environmental monitoring research outputs for real projects (from STEMM-CCS and ECO2 to Northern Lights, Greensand, and Northern Endurance Partnership).
• The Northern Lights Environmental Monitoring plan is ‘fit for purpose’
Recommendations were:
• Continue the outreach – addressing new industry players and sectors, and new countries
• Reach out to investors
• Capacity estimations need consistency – use SRMS
• Need for work on environmental impacts in GoM
• Make needs and perspectives known to regulators ASAP
• Each site is different – must let regulators know that one size does not fit all.
• Need for EPA engagement
Summing up: The CSLF Taskforce and Report on Offshore Storage made recommendations for knowledge sharing that has been successful in stimulating international cooperation, knowledge transfer, and project development in the offshore sector.
Another example of the good cooperation between US and Norwegian organizations is the strong partnership University of Illinois, Illinois, Illinois Geological Survey, and NORSAR. Sallie Greenberg expressed great satisfaction with the achievements at Decatur.
Bettina Goertz-Allmann continued with the more technical aspects of the cooperation:
· From basic-science to applied research. Addressing challenges for commercial deployment of CO2storage.
· Research related to mechanism for injection-induced microseismicity, with focus on how to control and predict its occurrence.
· Five central research themes: microseismicity, reservoir-scale geology, geomechanical measurements, pore-scale pressure transmission, and geochemical reactions.
A novel modeling framework have been developed that can efficiently address the varying orders of magnitude of spatial and temporal scales, enabling modeling of complex fault zones with high-resolution fault zone physics.
Thereafter followed brief presentations of the ACT capture projects
Ensure – Bettina Goertz-Allmann
HNET – Philip Ringrose
Digimon – Arvid Nøttvedt
Sense - Bahman Bohloli
Sharp – Elin Skurtveit
ACTOM - Guttorm Alendal
RexCO2 - Rajesh Pawar
All the above projects shows that ACT has been an important tool for international RD&D collaboration. Significant achievements within monitoring and re-use of infrastructure has been achieved.
Following the brief presentations was a discussion on the industries needs on storage with Steve Murphy, Storegga, and Vaibhava Singh, Equinor. Steve Murphy empasised that the ACT ACORN project paved way for securing a storage licence. This is a very good example of how RD&D can accelerate CCUS deployment
The session ended with a discussion chaired by Philip Ringrose, Equinior. Key statements were:
· When scaling up to commercial CO2 storage the access to finances is less challenging than the need for people with the expertise to do the job. Scale-up is expected to happen very fast and skills and human capacity are always lacking.
· Clarity on business models for CO2 storage is needed.
· Production and transport of hydrogen can have interesting synergies with continued expansion of onshore CO2 storage.
· There are many countries in Europe where the public is sceptic to CO2 storage. Well-designed communication activities are needed.