Otway C02 Storage Project

Client

Australian Government

Location

Otway, Australia

Project Cost

Date

Dec 1, 2021

Accurate simulation, forecasting, and monitoring of carbon dioxide behaviour / plume spreading in the complex subsurface is a prerequisite for safe and cost-effective high-volume CO2 abatement. Supporting the Australian primary- and energy sector industries in this quest, with tools and expertise that will transform traditional discipline-separated sequential workflows boosting productivity, is the goal of this simulation-guided engineering R&D and field-application project. The project is an international multidisciplinary collaboration of specialists including our consultants at GeoCarbon, the universities Queensland (UQ), and Savoie Mont-Blanc (ISTERRE & CNRS), focusing on improving the understanding of how CO2 behaves during geo-sequestration in the Australian subsurface and how this behaviour can be monitored.

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Reason For Choosing Us

The project has generated state-of-the-art software tools and workflows for performance assessment of storage sites which were tested by application to 3 key pilot sites (Figure 1). The tools will be validated with datasets from injection experiments at Otway, Aquistore and a Chinese CCS site. Field applications will revisit site characterisation and geomodelling, contributing to an improved understanding of the Australian subsurface.

Challenges

Space-time adaptive forward simulation of the CO2 injection process including forecasting of geophysical plume signature.
Inverse-modelling.
Simulation-driven design of monitoring systems.
Development of software framework for visualisation and analysis.

Project Gallery

Figure 1: Simulation set-up of HeuristicModel1 for forward simulation of geophysical signatures. The shaded box shows the extent of the model and the gray-scale slab represents the aquifer horizon into which the CO2 is injected. Fluid pressure is displayed using a translucent rainbow scheme and a snapshot of the CO2 plume is displayed using volume rendering. The green colour corresponds to a CO2 saturation of ~0.3.

Figure 2: Dilatation – vertical stress slice of a 3-way closure fault-footwall anticline CO2 buoyancy trap filled with a CO2 column of 300m. Maximum ground deflection induced by CO2 charge = 1.8cm. Simulation with CSMP++ CO2 geo-sequestration simulator; results benchmarked with Abaqus™.