Tess Dance

Safe storage and effective monitoring of CO2 in depleted gas fields

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is vital to reduce CO2 emissions to the atmosphere, potentially providing 20% of the needed reductions in global emissions. Research and demonstration projects are important to increase scientific understanding of CCS, and making processes and results widely available helps to reduce public concerns, which may otherwise block this technology. The Otway Project has provided verification of the underlying science of CO2 storage in a depleted gas field, and shows that the support of all stakeholders can be earned and retained. Quantitative verification of long-term storage has been demonstrated. A direct measurement of storage efficiency has been made, confirming that CO2 storage in depleted gas fields can be safe and effective, and that these structures could store globally significant amounts of CO2.

Multi-scale characterisation of the Paaratte Formation, Otway Basin, for CO2 injection and storage

Bunch, Mark; Lawrence, Mark; Dance, Tess; Daniel, Ric; Menacherry, Saju; Browne, Greg; Arnot, Malcolm

An experimental study of acoustic responses on the injection of supercritical CO2 into sandstones from the Otway Basin

Quantitative knowledge of the acoustic response of rock from an injection site on supercritical CO2 (scCO2) saturation is crucial for understanding the feasibility of time-lapse seismic monitoring of CO2 plume migration. A suite of shaley sandstones from the injection interval of the CRC-2 well, Otway Basin, Australia is tested to reveal the effects of supercritical CO2 injection on acoustic responses. CO2 is first injected into dry samples, flushed out with brine and then injected again into brine-saturated samples. Such a suite of experiments allows us to obtain acoustic velocities of the samples for a wide range of CO2/brine saturations from 0% to 100%. On injection of scCO2 into brine-saturated samples, the rocks exhibit a decrease of compressional velocities by about 7% with the increase of CO2 saturation from 0% to a maximum of about 50%. Anisotropy of the shaley sandstones from the Otway Basin must be taken into account as the difference in the velocities normal and parallel to bedding is comparable with the perturbation due to CO2 injection and the samples of different orientations exhibit transition from Gassmann-Hill to Gassmann-Wood bound at different scCO2 saturations. Changes of the dry samples before and after the CO2 injection (if any) are not traceable by acoustic methods.

Integrated rock physics models for improved 4D seismic monitoring of CO2 sequestration in Otway Basin, Australia

We build a detailed rock physics model that links the rock and fluid properties with seismic properties and accounts for variations in reservoir quality, fluid saturations, and seismic resolution. This approach will increase the accuracy of the predicted