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INTERA

INTERA

Environmental and Water Resource Consulting Firm

  • Services and Industries
        • Services
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Carbon Storage

September 20, 2022

September 20, 2022 by

CO2 gas saturation distribution after 30 years of injection in 2 wells located 0.5 miles apart, at a total rate of 1 million tonnes CO2 per year.

Challenge: To determine an unbiased two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional CO2 plume within a layered reservoir with variable properties.

Solution: Class VI injection well permitting requires that multi-phase computational modeling be used to delineate the Area of Review (AoR), based on the horizontal extent of a three-dimensional (3D) CO2 plume. INTERA staff, while employed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, helped develop a novel approach to quantify the extent of a CO2 plume based on calculating the vertically integrated mass per area (VIMPA). Simply projecting the 3D distribution of CO2 saturation onto a horizontal plane is neither representative, nor straightforward and can be biased by thin, permeable layers in the reservoir. The VIMPA method provides a simple, additive approach for determining an unbiased horizontal extent of a 3D CO2 plume in complex reservoirs with variable properties. It considers all the CO2 within the simulation domain rather than just that which resides in a certain layer, and is independent of the reservoir properties and conditions, allowing for standardization and comparison across all injection scenarios and sites. The VIMPA method can be applied to different zones such as the injection zone or confining zone (or any zone of interest) to understand the distribution of CO2 mass, providing a useful guide for monitoring system design. It can also be applied to the different phases or states of CO2 to determine the distribution of the immobile CO2 (i.e., dissolved CO2 and entrapped CO2) and mobile CO2. To demonstrate the value of the VIMPA methodology, INTERA staff simulated the injection of CO2 into a hypothetical saline reservoir at a rate of 1 million tonnes per year for 30 years using the CO2 mode of the Subsurface Transport Over Multiple Phases (STOMP-CO2) simulator. Simulations showed that 95% of the injected CO2 mass resides in the central 55% of the plume area. This demonstrated why using the maximum plume size based on gas saturation may not be appropriate because of the small amount of CO2 present in the region near the plume edge.

Results: After developing and verifying the VIMPA approach, it was applied to a proposed CO2 storage site in the midwestern US (as part of DOE’s FutureGen 2.0 project) that received the first-ever US Environmental Protection Agency permit for Class VI injection wells to store CO2.

The area representing the mass of super-critical CO2 vs. time for 30 years of CO2 injection into 2 wells followed by 50 years of plume redistribution.
Gas phase CO2 mass per area at the end of the 30-year injection period. The 3 concentric shapes are the plume boundaries within which 100%, 99%, and 95% of CO2 mass is encompassed. The numbers in parentheses are the areas of the corresponding shapes.
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August 8, 2022 · (Updated: September 20, 2022)

August 8, 2022 by

Challenge: To obtain injection well permits needed to support facility operations.

Solution: INTERA staff led the production of technical reports on geology and reservoir mechanics in support of several Class I injection well permit applications for sites operated by various companies, including Environmental Processing Systems, Pergan Marshall, US Ecology Texas, Texas Molecular, Rio Grande Resources, and ASARCO. Our efforts included using literature sources, historic data on bottom-hole pressures and injection rates, geophysical logs and petrophysical data, and pressure-fall off test results to evaluate the geology of the injection and confining zones, assess potential impacts to any underground sources of drinking water, and model future pressure buildup and waste-front propagation in the injection zone. Our model results were used to evaluate the impacts to artificial penetrations within an area of review around the proposed boreholes. INTERA staff also directly interfaced with state regulatory staff to expedite the resolution of permit application issues.

Results: All permits successfully obtained to ensure compliance with applicable regulatory requirements.

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