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Design of carbon dioxide storage

Martin J. Blunt¹

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1. Imperial College London, UK

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Date:

Received 10 December 2008 13:41 UTC; Posted 10 December 2008

Subjects:

Earth & Environment

Tags:

• carbon capture and storage
• carbon storage

Abstract:

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the collection of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from industrial sources and its injection underground – is an important technology to reduce CO₂ emissions to the atmosphere, mitigating climate change. The North Sea, with mature hydrocarbon fields and saline aquifers offers an attractive storage location for CO₂ produced by the UK’s gas and coal-fired power plants. The principal concern with CCS is to ensure that the CO₂ does not leak into the oceans or atmosphere over hundreds or thousands of years. We propose a storage strategy where CO₂ and brine are injected together followed by brine injection alone. We predict that using this technique around 95% of the CO₂ can be rendered immobile in pore-scale (10s micron) droplets in the porous rock. Over thousands to billions of years the CO₂ may dissolve or precipitate as carbonate, but it will not migrate upwards and so is effectively sequestered. This design is demonstrated through numerical simulation of field-scale flow through a North Sea aquifer coupled to an experimentally-based model of small-scale trapping. The CO₂ is trapped during the decades-long lifetime of the injection phase, avoiding the need for extensive monitoring for centuries. The method does not rely on impermeable cap rock to contain the CO₂; this is only a secondary containment for the small amount of remaining mobile gas. Furthermore, the reduced mobility ratio between injected and displaced fluids leads to a more uniform sweep of the aquifer leading a larger storage capacity than injecting CO₂ alone.

Collection:

Virtual Conference on Climate Change and CO2 Storage

Presented at:

Virtual conference on climate change and CO2 storage, 03 December 2008

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This document is licensed to the public under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How to cite this document:

Blunt, Martin. Design of carbon dioxide storage. Available from Nature Precedings <http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2008.2628.1> (2008)

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