Chapter 1 - Introduction to CCUS

1.01 Course Summary (8 min.) Sample Lesson
1.02 Central Theme Through Out Course (18 min.)
1.03 Key Components in Overview (13 min.)
1.04 Target of CCUS, Where are the Projects and Timing/Scale of Projects (9 min.)
1.05 Attractiveness of Western Canadian Basin Targets (8 min.)
1.06 Where are CCS projects in North America and Worldwide (19 min.)
1.07 Answer to Conversion Question (3 min.)

Chapter 2 - Economics

2.01 Economics - Building on our mental model (12 min.)
2.02 Infrastructure and Pipelines (9 min.)
2.03 Building on your Mental Model (6 min.)
2.04 Carbon Capture Technology (9 min.)
2.05 CO₂ Transportation - Pipelines (11 min.)
2.06 Site Criteria for CCS - Geology (17 min.)

Chapter 3 - Reservoir Characteristics & Fluid Properties

3.01 Mechanisms of Trapping (19 min.)
3.02 Fluid Properties/Phase Behavior (15 min.)
3.03 What Type of Storage Do I Select? (16 min.)

Chapter 4 - Permeability, Injectivity & Plume Migration

4.01 Why Can’t We Just Use Core (air) Permeability? (20 min.)
4.02 Long Term Reservoir Injection Rates, Pressures and Injectivity (9 min.)
4.03 Plume Migration (6 min.)
4.04 Shell Quest Project (23 min.)

Chapter 5 - General Workflow for CCUS

5.01 General Workflow Overview (10 min.)
5.02 Volumetrics for Aquifer, Depleted Oil and Gas Field (15 min.)
5.03 Regional Aquifer Study - Part 1 (10 min.)
5.04 Regional Aquifer Study - Part 2 (18 min.)
5.05 Value of Information from Existing Wells for CCUS (10 min.)
5.06 Quest Project - Comparing OGIP vs Volume (3 min.)

Chapter 6 - Core & Log Analysis

6.01 Core and Log Examination (20 min.)
6.02 Storage Efficiency (11 min.)
6.03 Reservoir Injectivity - Part 1 (8 min.)
6.04 Reservoir Injectivity - Part 2 (12 min.)

Chapter 7 - CO₂ Storage Constraints

7.01 Constraints on CO₂ Storage (24 min.)
7.02 Exercise, Calculation of Viscous Gravity (Lakes method) Number (14 min.)

Chapter 8 - Seismic & Plume Movement

8.01 Seismic Images (16 min.)
8.02 Depleted Oil and Gas Reservoirs (20 min.)
8.03 How does the Plume Move with Time? (7 min.)
8.04 Plume Migration Long Term Storage (20 min.)

Chapter 9 - Wellbore Evaluation & Risk

9.01 Carbon Capture Risks (9 min.)
9.02 Wellbore Risk During Operational Phase (13 min.)
9.03 Evaluation Wellbore/Fracture/Fault Failure (9 min.)
9.04 Cranfield Mississippi USA (10 min.)

Chapter 10 - Monitoring & Verification

10.01 Monitoring and Verification for CCS (10 min.)
10.02 Injection Pressure, Rates and Injectivity (4 min.)
10.03 SACROC Monitoring (6 min.)
10.04 Key Questions (Learning Objectives) (15 min.)
10.05 Conclusions (8 min.)
10.06 Bonus Lesson - CCS Failures (5 min.) Quiz: 10.06 Bonus Lesson - CCS Failures

CO₂ Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) / Chapter 1 - Introduction to CCUS

Lesson 1.01 Course Summary

Access All SAGA Wisdom Training content Subscribe

Already a member? Sign in

Access All SAGA Wisdom Training content Subscribe

Already a member? Sign in

Transcript

01. Lesson 1.01: Course Summary 02. Tug of War 03. Executive Summary Of CCUS Course

01. Lesson 1.01: Course Summary

My name is Richard Baker and we're doing a course on Carbon Capture and Storage.
We're primarily going to focus on aquifers and depleted gas fields in these initial looks at the field. There's a lot of material in here and I apologize for the intensity of the material. There's about 300 - 400 slides that I've put in here and I've tried to reduce them a number of times. And so for some of you, you'll find it probably a little bit too intense. But hopefully, with a rewind and forward, you can understand some of these principles. I think it's critical that we make carbon capture and storage a viable option. And the reason I did this course in the first place was I wanted to introduce techniques that I think are critical to make practical evaluations of these reservoirs.

02. Tug of War

This course is a bit of a tug of war between an overview approach and a lot of courses right now deal with sort of overviews. Why are we doing carbon capture? What's happening on climate? That kind of stuff. And we touch on that a little bit here, but it's not the extensive focus of the course. Really, what I want you to do is understand the economics of a CO₂ hub. And what I mean by a hub is a group of reservoirs or aquifers tied to a CO₂ source. We want to do detailed reservoir and aquifer characterization and workflows. We want to understand the risks. And I think there's a lot of misconceptions out there in terms of the risk factor. This is very doable in terms of practicality and also execution of it. But I think certain people emphasize risk too much and other times we're not accounting for risks. And so I really wanted to have a chance to address this myself. And then we're going to talk about monitoring and verification, which obviously is coupled to risk I think. And so when you look at it, it's a bit of a tug of war between all of those factors, what this course is really about.

03. Executive Summary Of CCUS Course

If I wanted to summarize some points of this CCUS course, I want to stress something. Others have done a lot of really good work in the last 20 years on this area. And so especially 10 - 15 years ago, there was a lot of talk about theoretical capacity, realized like all sets that this is data dependent. And so theoretical capacity is you just map everything out, you have 100% continuity and if you have storage volume, you can store CO₂. Well, what I'm going to show you is nothing could be farther from the truth.
So there's a large difference between theoretical capacity as well as effective realistic capacity, and we're going to stress that for the initial part of the course. You can't just look at storage volumes. Permeability and continuity are probably the most critical factors. And think of it like if I had a map of the oil industry or the oil distribution in 1949 of all of Alberta, well, that would be one way of looking at but you wouldn't necessarily go to the oil sands initially, even though it has the most volume in place is, you're going to go to high-permeability reservoirs like the Leduc's and the Nisku's and that kind of stuff first. So again, when you look at historical context, you have to account for permeability and continuity in these things and they remain unknown in some of these reservoirs, these aquifers, especially with limited amount of perforations.
And the other thing that's important to understand, and I think is probably the most critical and the reason why I got involved with it in the first place is we really need to understand both the technical factors as well as the economic factors. Some of the economic models and there is excellent examples of them in both Canada, the United States, and in Europe, where they've tried to look at what the economics of carbon capture and storage is, generally don't look at anything but other than breakeven economics. If I walked into a boardroom in Calgary and said, well, your payout is 15 - 20 years and you have a 3 or 4% rate of return or a negative return, don't expect that people are going to invest. Now, think of it yourself. Put yourself in this course and think of it. Would I invest in this? If the answer is yes, then you've got a good story. If the answer is no, I'm waiting for incentives, whatever. That's fine. Wait until we get the incentives and move forward. But you can't have it both ways. Money is typically a coward, and it invests in things where they think you can make a return on it.
The next thing I'd want to stress is that you've got to take models and that means all models whether it's empirical or numerical flow simulation or whatever, you have to take them with a grain of salt. We sample 1/10,000,000,000 of the reservoir, and we have that limitation again and again and again. And so especially when we talk about saline aquifers, the problem we have is we have limited penetration. Yes, we've gone deeper to mitigate some of the risks of wellbore risks. But at the same time, now we have lot less data to deal with. And so initial models, I always am very pessimistic with it, even if they're my own models.
Another important thing is when you're looking at CCUS type projects is you have to pay attention to scale. One of the things that people do and everybody loves the limelight and I get why people want to say, well, we're doing this for the world and the carbon management and whatever and everybody wants that limelight, but there's huge differences in project size. I think in Canada and United States, as well as parts of Europe, definitely in Norway, is there is large-scale projects that we have to pay attention to. But there's also a large number of small projects. Now, that's not to say they don't have any value. It's just you have to keep the total volume targets that we have in mind when you're designing these things. So project size, megatons per year, is an extremely important scale to pay attention to. And we also have to pay attention to the spatial orientation. A lot of work that was done last 10 years ago or 10 - 15 years ago, were our regional studies. They're done by governments, they're done by geological societies and whatever, and they're not wrong. It's just they don't weight all the factors associated, specifically continuity and permeability. And so when we get into detailed mapping, we're going to have a lot of surprise. And that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about effective capacity vs. theoretical capacity.
One of the things that I'll stress is after 38 years in the oil industry, it's better to have the devil that you know than the devil that you don't know. In other words, we have a lot of information that we know from the oil and gas fields and other sources in the world, we have a lot of information in those kind of fields, and that increases our confidence level. And so sometimes we have to balance that confidence level with the fears that we have in our own mental model.
I think that existing oil fields and I would actually revise this what Lynn Orr stated is I would say, the likelihood of using gas fields in the first place to store CO₂ to me seems the most likely target. I don't have any ownership or any vested interest in any particular type of gas field or whatever, but I think it is a practical solution. And the nice thing about CCUS is it is a large, large target. It's an achievable target. It's going to cost us money for sure. But I think that we do have good targets both in large saline aquifers or in existing gas fields.