Chapter 1 – Introduction To CO₂ Capture

01-01 - Introduction (11 min.) Sample Lesson
01-02 - General Workflow (21 min.)
01-03 - Review of Trapping Mechanisms (14 min.)
01-04 - Review of Site Selection (10 min.)
01-05 - Fluid Properties/Phase Behavior of CO₂ (15 min.)
01-06 - CO₂ Sequestration in Depleted Reservoir (12 min.)
01-07 - Learnings from Field Cases; In Salah, Snovit, Weyburn ()

Chapter 2 - Evaluating Risk

02-01 - Plume Migration ()
02-02 - Quest Project Example: Uncertainty in Volumetrics, Faults, Fractures and Wellbore ()
02-03 - Expected CO₂ Loss Due to Fractures, Faults, Wellbores ()
02-04 - Risk Assessment: The Difference Between Saline Aquifer and Depleted Reservoirs ()
02-05 - Class Problem: Assessment of Risk Likelihood ()
02-06 - Government Regulation of CCS and CCUS ()

Chapter 3 - Monitoring lnjectivity

03-01 - Learnings From Field Cases; Sleipner, Quest, Aquistore, Snovit ()
03-02 - Wellbore Design and Construction ()
03-03 - Measurement, Monitoring and Verification (MMV) + ()
03-04 - Falloff Tests & Step Rate Tests ()
03-05 - Analogue Data ()
03-06 - Conclusions ()

Risk Assessment & Verification For Carbon Capture Projects / Chapter 1 – Introduction To CO₂ Capture

Lesson 01-01 - Introduction

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Transcript

01. Lesson 1.01: Introduction 02. Outline 03. Outline (2)04. CO₂ Conversions 05. Executive Summary

01. Lesson 1.01: Introduction

OK, so this course is aboutand Measuring, Monitoring and Verification for Carbon Capture Projects.
My name's Richard Baker and it's a pretty intense course. There's quite a bit of material and I'm going to go through the outline first and give you an idea of what we're going to cover and then we're going to move on to some executive summary and then we'll progress from there.
There's certain parts of this course that we handled briefly. In the previous course, we had maybe more material on that kind of stuff. But I don't think I need to rehash the whole thing. So I've abbreviated certain parts of this and if you want the background, it's in the previous course.

02. Outline

Let's just start with an outline. We're going to talk about introduction. We're going to talk a little bit about site selection, again, CO₂ fluid properties, and just some overviews on trapping mechanisms and that kind of stuff. I'm going to handle it hopefully quite briefly, but it's material that you need to understand.
We're going to talk about international field cases: Sleipner, Quest, Snovit, Aquistore, all those kind of ones, because I think it's really important to understand what the field cases show you and get sort of practical learnings from that. So we're going to look at theand Quest projects and look at the plume migration with it. We're going to talk a lot about fractures and faults and and their influence on CCS ortype projects. I use the term CSS usually to mean either injection into depleted gas fields or saline aquifers. I use the term CCUS as carbon capture and utilization and storage. It usually means type stuff. And we're going to learn a little bit fromin Algeria and then from the Norwegian see, the Snovit field and talk about what we see in those type of projects.
Then we're going to talk about risk, OK, and how you handle risk and a little bit about the workflow associated with that and then what you're really focusing on. In a nutshell, when you're looking at risk monitoring, measurement, and verification, you're primarily worried about 2 things, and that is you're worried about faults and fractures and you're worried about existing wellbores which are using your injector and that those are the highest pressure leak points. And then in addition, you may look at things like legacy, legacy wellbores or old wellbores. Remember, it's almost like a game of snakes and ladders. It's really, what's important isn't so much how things migrate laterally, it's also what are the potential sites for leakage upwards. Because that vertical growth, even if you're in, let's say, a deep saline aquifer, there's always a potential for CO₂ to rise higher. So we're going to talk a lot about that in this course.

03. Outline (2)

We're going to talk also about injectivity a little bit more. I know I covered quite a bit of this in the first course, but I also wanted to address things more directly, like about salt precipitation mechanisms and that kind of stuff. And then we're also going to talk about thermal fracturing of injectors and thermoelastic and poroelastic effects.
And once you understand the risks associated with it, it helps you design your monitoring and verification. I'm going to give you a list of about 50 items of things that people have done historically to monitor. But the real hard part is how do you decide what are your top 20 that you're actually going to do? And so I hope I can give you some guidance on that area.
And then we're finally going to conclude this course with some conclusions.

04. CO₂ Conversions

Again, I'm going to include this into the notes. This is kind of a handy thing to always have around is your conversions. Remember, when we're dealing in the CSS world, we're dealing usually with megatonnes/year, OK. And then if you're an oil and gas, you tend to deal with volumes. So there's really 2 numbers to kind of keep in your back of your mind. You need to know that 1 Mt/y equals about 53.8 MMcf/d, OK. So 53.8 MMcf/d is a pretty substantial amount of gas volume and that's the equivalent of about 1 Mt/y. Now, just to give you ranges; generally successful CCS projects to date are all been around that 1 Mt, maybe with the exception of the Australian project,project, which is about 2.5 Mt/y. So that's a number to keep in your mind, 53.8. And then the second one to keep in your mind is 19.6. So 19.6 Mcf, thousand cubic feet, equals about a metric tonne of CO₂. So those are kind of handy things to always keep in the back of your mind. If you're doing the conversion from CCS to, let's say, petroleum units or something like that, it's good to work off and those are obviously based on surface conditions.

05. Executive Summary

OK, so let's talk about, on the executive summary here, what are the key points that we're going to get out of this course?
Well, when we're looking at risk and MMV, initially our site characterization and risk will focus on the targetor reservoir, in the case of depleted gas reservoirs. So initially, you start off, you're focused on that target reservoir, and then you kind of, generally you work upwards, then you look ats and such. And so you're looking at primary and secondary barriers and tertiary barriers, and then you're looking at faults and fractures and vertical pathways from that.
Now, one thing you need to understand is there is no universal, like it's not like you have the United Nations or somebody says, well, these things are what have to be in the monitoring and verification. So if you look at differences between countries, there're fairly substantial differences between countries and even within projects in terms of MMV. And a lot of it's what they would call fit for purpose. But if you're learning this project type work, it's a little bit confusing because you can read one thing as one guideline, another thing. And the thing that you need to understand right now is there's no universal standard for this.
I would say if there's a sort of main thought, when you look universally across CCS projects, the quote or whatever it is, that is you're trying to get about 99% retention over 1,000 years. That's kind of your goal is you only want 1% leakage. I think zero leakage is not likely to happen, but 99% retention, I think with a well-designed project you can easily achieve that.
So risk must assume not just the target reservoir, you must also concern the vertical risk. So a lot of what we're talking about in this course is vertical risk factors and also possible multiple pathways. So old wellbores and faults can be primary pathways, OK.
Now, I'm going to give you this piece of advice, but I don't expect you necessarily always to follow it. But one thing I've learned just with project work worldwide in the last 40 years is that when we start up these projects, it's better to just gradually start them up and get an idea and gradually develop it. And because we want to understand injection wellbores, we want to understand how the buildup of reservoir pressures, we want to understand legacy wells and geomechanical effects and then we also want to get a handle on above zone monitoring. And so what happens is that's not the way it usually goes. Usually what's going to happen is your boss is going to want to go as hard as you can, as fast as you can, but realize there's learning curves associated with it. And it doesn't matter how much planning you do, there's always stuff that's going to happen and a gradual step up of injection rate, I'm going to give you that as an advice and I kind of expect that many of you won't do that, but that's a pretty good view of wisdom through the ages is that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
So in the next section, we're going to talk about general workflow and then how we approach these problems to give you a feel of things that are handy to know.
So that's kind of a wrap on what were really the key points of what we get from the executive summary. Obviously, and I cover it with a lot more details than that. We only have a mere 300+ slides to go on this. But those are the kind of things to keep in the back of your mind that we're going to be talking about a lot. And then in the next section, I'm going to talk about general workflow and just how things might evolve when you're looking at risk in MMV.