Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership: Findings from the Michigan Basin Phase III Injection Test Monitoring Program

Abstract

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage is a crucial technology for enabling the use of abundant and reliable fossil fuel resources with greatly reduced carbon intensity. The U.S. Department of Energy established the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership in 2003 to perform research and development on geologic storage of carbon dioxide in ten states spanning the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic region. The MRCSP is a consortium of industry, private companies, universities, non-governmental organizations and state agencies with a goal to assess the potential, economic viability, and public acceptability of carbon sequestration within its region. The Michigan Basin Phase III Injection Test is designed to inject and monitor one million metric tons of anthropogenic carbon dioxide within a series of formations currently being used for enhanced oil recovery operations. The project is being carried out across ten pinnacle reefs in fields in different stages of their production life-cycle: one late-stage reef, six active reefs and three new reefs that have only experienced primary oil production (new carbon dioxide floods). The project successfully injected and monitored the combined storage of one million metric tons carbon dioxide in March 2018. The late-stage reef served as the main test reef for application of monitoring, verification and accounting technologies. The closed carbonate reservoir provides an ideal system for testing the ability of technologies - such as pulsed neutron capture logging, borehole gravity surveys, vertical seismic profiling, and satellite monitoring - to record the behavior and fate of injected carbon dioxide in the subsurface. Monitoring of carbon dioxide injection and oil production in active and new reefs at the test site include pressure and wireline logging and fluid flow mass balances, as well as metering of the injection volume, recycle of carbon dioxide gas produced with oil, and new compressed carbon dioxide from the natural gas processing plant. One new reef was selected for detailed characterization and additional monitoring, including fiber-optic based temperature and acoustic systems, multi-level pressure, and periodic logging in the injector and monitoring well. Data from these multiple fields has provided insight into the impact of geologic heterogeneity and hydrocarbon production history on CO2 storage potential. This presentation will provide an overview of the key findings of the MRCSP monitoring program and how this information may be applied to future commercial storage sites. MRCSP is supported by U.S. DOE-NETL Agreement No. DE-FC26-0NT42589.

AAPG Datapages/Search and Discovery Article #90335 © 2018 AAPG 47th Annual AAPG-SPE Eastern Section Joint Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, October 7-11, 2018