Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
1 Introduction
One of the most promising options to alleviate global warming is carbon capture and storage (CCS), a short- and long-term strategy for reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). CCS involves three stages: (a) capturing and compressing CO2 emitted by industry; (b) transporting the CO2 as a supercritical fluid; and (c) sequestering this fluid by injecting it in subsurface geologic reservoirs such as deep saline aquifers, or oil and gas reservoirs that are at least partially depleted (see Middleton et al. 2012). Of these, saline aquifers offer the largest storage volumes for CCS (DOE-NETL 2015); but CO2 injection in hydrocarbon reservoirs is also of use for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) (Dai et al. 2014a, b, 2016).
The 2015 Paris agreement marks a new willingness by international leaders to collaborate on climate change mitigation. But the merit of the whole CCS program is still debated, because of recent instabilities in world politics, the scientific complexity of CCS, controversial environmental impacts from possible leakage, and uncertainties regarding cost (Bielicki et al. 2014; Bachu 2016).
Whatever further difficulties are to be overcome, improved understanding of CCS processes is a critical first step. Decision-makers, along with the general public, rightly demand assurances that the science, economics, and environmental risks of CO2 capture, transport, and storage are fully researched. Only then can the safe sequestration of CO2 be guaranteed, for thousands or at least hundreds of years; but so far, several pieces of the scientific puzzle are missing. Transport and trapping processes, dependent on solubility, residual, structural, and mineral factors, are not well understood. These encompass such complexities as multiphase flow, combined with chemical, thermal, mechanical, and biological interactions between fluids and the reservoir rocks (Benson and Cole 2008). In particular, oversimplified models and experiments leave us at risk of incorrect predictions for CCS’s effectiveness. Several major questions challenge our research ingenuity. How are the processes controlled by interplay between large-scale flow patterns (such as fingering) and local-scale Fickian diffusion, mechanical dispersion, and chemical reactions? How can we incorporate small-scale processes (at pore and core scale) into large-scale flow and transport models? What are the implications of multiphase flow, and of thermodynamic changes in fluid properties, for the long-term behaviour of stored CO2? How does the heterogeneity of rock–fluid properties, bringing its own elevation of uncertainties, impact the fate of CO2 transport in storage reservoirs?
2 Scope of the special issue
Our special issue works to meet such challenges. We assemble recent developments in accurate modelling and sophisticated experimental approaches, which together will guide the design and implementation of geological CO2 storage. Explicitly devoted to Geologic CO 2 Sequestration, the issue comprises contributions that advance our understanding of CCS processes, and our ability to assess environmental risks despite inevitable limitations in the data. We outline those contributions below.
-
1.
Mixing and spreading of multiphase fluids in heterogeneous bimodal porous media by Amooie et al. (2017)
-
2.
Performance assessment of CO2-enhanced oil recovery and storage in the Morrow reservoir by Ampomah et al. (2017)
-
3.
Effective constitutive relations for simulating CO2 capillary trapping in heterogeneous reservoirs with fluvial sedimentary architecture by Gershenzon et al. (2017)
-
4.
Evaluation of pressure management strategies and impact of simplifications for a post-EOR CO2 storage project by Jia et al. (2017)
-
5.
An object-based modeling and sensitivity analysis study in support of CO2 storage in deep saline aquifers at the Shenhua site, Ordos basin by Nguyen et al. (2017)
-
6.
Dynamic reduced-order models of integrated physics-specific systems for carbon sequestration by Sun and Tong (2017)
-
7.
Modeling plume behavior through a heterogeneous sand pack using a commercial invasion percolation model by Trevisan et al. (2017)
-
8.
Reactive transport modeling of arsenic mobilization in shallow groundwater: Impacts of CO2 and brine leakage by Xiao et al. (2017)
-
9.
Soil gas dynamics monitoring at a CO2-EOR site for leakage detection by Yang et al. (2017)
References
Amooie MA, Soltanian MR, Xiong F, Dai Z, Moortgat J (2017) Mixing and spreading in bimodal porous media. Geomech Geophys Geo-Energy Geo-Resour. doi:10.1007/s40948-017-0060-8
Ampomah W, Balch R, Grigg RB, Cather M, Will RA, White M, Moodie N, Dai Z (2017) Performance assessment of CO2-enhanced oil recovery and storage in the morrow reservoir. Geomech Geophys Geo-Energy Geo-Resour. doi:10.1007/s40948-017-0059-1
Bachu S (2016) Identification of oil reservoirs suitable for CO2-EOR and CO2 storage (CCUS) using reserves databases, with application to Alberta, Canada. Int J Greenh Gas Control 44:152–165
Benson SM, Cole DR (2008) CO2 sequestration in deep sedimentary formations. Elements 4(5):325–331
Bielicki JM, Pollak MF, Fitts JP, Peters CA, Wilson EJ (2014) Causes and financial consequences of geologic CO2 storage reservoir leakage and interference with other subsurface resources. Int J Greenh Gas Control 20:272–284
Dai Z, Middleton R, Viswanathan H, Fessenden-Rahn J, Bauman J, Pawar R, Lee SY, McPherson B (2014a) An integrated framework for optimizing CO2 sequestration and enhanced oil recovery. Environ Sci Technol Lett 1(1):49–54
Dai Z, Keating E, Bacon D, Viswanathan H, Stauffer P, Jordan A, Pawar R (2014b) Probabilistic evaluation of shallow groundwater resources at a hypothetical carbon sequestration site. Sci Rep 4:4006
Dai Z, Viswanathan H, Middleton R, Pan F, Ampomah W, Yang C, Jia W, Xiao T, Lee SY, McPherson B, Balch R (2016) CO2 accounting and risk analysis for CO2 sequestration at enhanced oil recovery sites. Environ Sci Technol 50(14):7546–7554
DOE-NETL (U.S. Department of Energy–National Energy Technology Laboratory), 2015. Carbon Storage Atlas Fifth Editions. https://www.netl.doe.gov/research/coal/carbon-storage/natcarb-atlas
Gershenzon NI, Ritzi RW, Dominic DF, Mehnert E (2017) Effective constitutive relations for simulating CO2 capillary trapping in heterogeneous reservoirs with fluvial sedimentary architecture. Geomech Geophys Geo-Energy Geo-Resour. doi:10.1007/s40948-017-0057-3
Jia W, McPherson B, Dai Z, Irons T, Xiao T (2017) Evaluation of pressure management strategies and impact of simplifications for a post-EOR CO2 storage project. Geomech Geophys Geo-Energy Geo-Resour. doi:10.1007/s40948-017-0056-4
Middleton RS, Keating GN, Stauffer PH, Jordan AB, Viswanathan HS, Kang QJ, Carey JW, Mulkey ML, Sullivan EJ, Chu SP, Esposito R (2012) The cross-scale science of CO2 capture and storage: from pore scale to regional scale. Energy Environ Sci 5(6):7328–7345
Nguyen MC, Zhang Y, Stauffer PH (2017) An object-based modeling and sensitivity analysis study in support of CO2 storage in deep saline aquifers at the Shenhua site. Geomech Geophys Geo-Energy Geo-Resour, Ordos basin. doi:10.1007/s40948-017-0063-5
Sun Y, Tong C (2017) Dynamic reduced-order models of integrated physics-specific systems for carbon sequestration. Geomech Geophys Geo-Energy Geo-Resour. doi:10.1007/s40948-017-0061-7
Trevisan L, Illangasekare TH, Meckel TA (2017) Modelling plume behavior through a heterogeneous sand pack using a commercial invasion percolation model. Geomech Geophys Geo-Energy Geo-Resour. doi:10.1007/s40948-017-0055-5
Xiao T, Dai Z, McPherson B, Viswanathan H, Jia W (2017) Reactive transport modeling of arsenic mobilization in shallow groundwater: impacts of CO2 and brine leakage. Geomech Geophys Geo-Energy Geo-Resours. doi:10.1007/s40948-017-0058-2
Yang C, Romanak KD, Reedy RC, Hovorka SD, Trevino RH (2017) Soil gas dynamics monitoring at a CO2-EOR site for leakage detection. Geomech Geophys Geo-Energy Geo-Resour. doi:10.1007/s40948-017-0053-7
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Soltanian, M.R., Dai, Z. Geologic CO2 sequestration: progress and challenges. Geomech. Geophys. Geo-energ. Geo-resour. 3, 221–223 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40948-017-0066-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40948-017-0066-2