Residual Gas Geological Storage

Crepin, Stephan¹, Pierre Brossollet¹, Marc Lescanne², Sylvain Thibeau¹ (1) DGEP/SCR/RD/PJ, Pau, France (2) Total, Pau, France

It is more than likely that human activity is implicated in global climate warming with a high level of emission of anthropogenic CO2. At the time, in the medium term, it will undoubtedly be difficult to go along without fossil fuel Energy, and industry has to find some ways to decrease the rate of GHG emission, until Clean Energy has taken over.

Geological Storage of CO2 is then considered as a very attractive way to reach this emis­sion reduction goal. Using the same geological storage concept for H2S gas, as already applied in Canada at a small scale, would also allow unlocking enormous worldwide sour gas reserves. Total as other major Oil and Gas Cies has launched important R&D programs to develop the confidence on this Residual Gas Management option.

This poster will illustrate the main R&D efforts carried out in order to make a Performance and Risk Assessment on Residual Gas Storages to get public and legal acceptance for these storages. In order to simulate storage reservoir behaviour along 1000 of years, special care has to be taken on Caprock and Wells integrity, to confirm the sustain­ability of the trap, which requires a lot of improvement of our knowledge and of the neces­sary modelling tools. Different scientific disciplines as Thermodynamics, Geochemistry, Geomechanics are involved in this process. Another effort has been addressed: investiga­tion on innovative or existing but to be adapted monitoring means for verification and sur­veillance purpose.