The Challenges of Hazard Management for Commercial Carbon Sequestration Projects

Julio Friedmann and Roger Aines
Carbon Management Program, Lawrence Livermore Natl. Lab, Livermore, CA

Large-scale CCS deployment will require a new industrial operational base closely aligned to the oil and gas industry. These operations will proceed through a project life cycle that will include sets of tasks (e.g., site characterization, baseline monitoring) and sets of decisions points (e.g., permitting, financing, site closure). Current uncertainty in permitting, regulation, and public acceptance limits investment, and CCS deployment would benefit from clearly defined operational practices and protocols. To be successful and relevant, protocols must be technically based and applicable to a wide range of geological settings and operating conditions throughout the life cycle. In this context, a scientific and technical program is required to provide the technical to underpin best practices and operational protocols.

Investors, public stakeholders, potential regulators, and operators need tools by which they can manage the risks at a proposed site. In doing so, the most important initial steps are to identify potential hazards and develop tools to manage them. Here, we present the results from a commercial project in the central Rocky Mountains and the approaches we used. Specifically, we identified and ranked the most important geological and engineering hazards, including wells, fault leakage, groundwater contamination, and induced seismicity. Simulation of atmospheric, engineering, and geological processes provided constraints on the failure envelopes, the potential consequences of failure scenarios, and approaches for monitoring and mitigation. We concluded that the site hazards could be readily managed based on diligent site characterization and conservative simulation approaches.

AAPG Search and Discover Article #90078©2008 AAPG Annual Convention, San Antonio, Texas