Pressure Control and Conformance Management for Safe and Efficient CO2 Storage – An Overview of the Pre-ACT Project

Abstract

Pre-ACT is a three-year (2017-2020) research project on CO2 storage which brings together a partnership of 10 research institutes and industrial companies. Pre-ACT is delivering cutting-edge research into the safe storage and monitoring of CO2. The focus is on improving strategies for monitoring and management of pore pressure within the storage reservoir. Pre-ACT is establishing methodologies to assess the conformance of a storage site, relative to its expected performance, through research in five work packages. The primary output will be a quantitative conformance system that utilises a cost-effective monitoring strategy to define a series of pressure-driven support protocols. The protocols are directly applicable to industrial operators and focus on the main storage-related challenges for accelerated deployment of CCS: capacity, confidence and cost.

Most of the work during the first year in Pre-ACT has addressed pre-injection (pressure) modelling, pressure and saturation monitoring, and conformance assessment. Examples of initial work include: (1) studies at the Horda Platform (North Sea) showing the importance of uncertainty in interpretation of faults and their sealing properties for Smeaheia pre-injection pressure modelling; (2) planning of an experiment for controlled pressure- and saturation discrimination at the Svelvik Field Lab and development of an approach to separate the effects of pressure and saturation changes; and (3) the development of a conformance assessment tool and value-of-information workflow for comparison of different monitoring configurations (expected gain and deployment cost).

Keywords: CO2 storage, pressure modelling, cost-effective monitoring, conformance verification, decision making, Storage only CCS projects, GHGT-14