Hello again, everyone, and welcome to another edition of Oxford Net zero Climate in the Balance.
Our series of conversations running throughout the term here at Hillary at Oxford in
which we talk about getting to net zero emissions in order to end global warming.
This week, we're discussing putting carbon back into geological storage.
You may have noticed that the title for this week was on the website between a rock and a wet place.
One of the best titles we've got for this series so far.
But we realised actually, as we developed this session as a group that we've got plenty of material to work with in terms of rocks and water.
So we've decided to focus on rocks this week, actually.
And Professor Ross Rikabi will cover the wet place, the Ocean, in a special bonus week with colleagues at the end of this net zero series.
So just to give you a heads up, for those of you who've been with us for a long run or just joining us,
we have three more conversations remaining this term. Next week, we've got.
Net zero for local communities and we have the race to zero by cities, businesses and investors.
And then our final bonus extra session on storing carbon in the oceans, which will be on the 22nd of March, all on Mondays at one p.m. U.K. time.
So for those of you who don't know me, I'm Steve Smith, executive director of the Oxford Net Zero Initiative.
And with me today, I'm delighted to discuss CO2 and rocks.
We have Professor Mike Kendal. Professor Joe Cartwright and Dr Tom Cataldie, all from the Department of Earth Sciences here at Oxford.
So Mike Kendal is a professor of geophysics and has applied his interest in seismology, in fact.
I think we have three seismology experts here with us today. But Mike's particular interest,
a very wide covering fundamental science on the workings of the inner earth and
continental movements through to applications in understanding geothermal energy,
fracking and most relevant to this session, subsurface CO2 storage.
He's worked on some of the largest CO2 storage projects across the world and was recently elected a fellow of the Royal Society to.
And Professor Joe Cartwright is Professor of Earth Sciences and uses seismology and
other methods to understand the various processes at work in geological basins,
which, if I understand as a non geologist, depressions in the earth which collect sediments.
Is that is that right? I'm saying not a CEX. Ask it. So these are particularly relevant both in the formation of reservoirs of oil and gas,
but also as potential sites for taking me carbon dioxide that we emit through burning most things, putting it back in the ground.
And Joe has worked for a time previously in oil and gas exploration itself.
So has real understanding and knowledge of how these skills work practically and in a business setting.
And then finally, Ben, certainly not least, Dr Tom Cataldie is a post-doctoral researcher studying injection induced seismicity.
In other words, that the earthquakes, which are generally small but can be large,
that are caused by pumping various things into the ground, including CO2 or other liquids.
And critically,
he is seeking to understand the mechanisms at play that caused the seismicity and how we can better forecast them and perhaps avoid them.
So Tom studied physics at Bristol before gaining his PHC last year in geology at Bristol and then
subsequently joined Oxford and has experienced advising the UK government's oil and Gas Authority,
particularly on the famous or perhaps infamous fracking project near Blackpool may
have heard of to understand what caused the seismicity in that particular case.
So with that line-up in mind and before we get going. We'd love it as usual,
if you could ask your questions and we will do our best to to address those after our three speakers have had a chance to to start the conversation.
So in order to ask a question, you need to be viewing on crowd cast rather than YouTube.
And hopefully they're on track cast. You can see the green. Ask a question or ask a question button at the bottom right of the screen.
And in there, you can type in your question or you can vote up those questions already written that you like the look of.
So without further ado, I think, Mike, let's start with you.
So just to set the scene, we've heard a lot in previous conversations in this series,
putting carbon back into the ground as permanently as possible is likely to play
a really important role in getting us nationally and globally to net zero,
both for dealing with some of the hard to treat emissions at source, particularly things such as a manufacturing of iron, steel and cement,
and maybe a few other sources that are difficult to come up with zero carbon alternatives,
but also for taking some carbon dioxide back out of the air, so-called carbon dioxide removal or negative emissions.
I was just looking at the scenarios by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
for keeping us globally to around one and a half degrees global temperature rise.
And they predict that carbon capture and storage is going to need to be in the range of hundreds of billions
of tons to maybe even a trillion tons over the course of the 21st century from now to twenty one hundred.
That's 10 to 20 times the level of all global emissions annually at the moment.
So clearly, this is a big issue, something we should be thinking carefully about.
What can you tell us, Mike? OK. Thank you for the introduction, Steve, and it's a pleasure to be speaking as part of this series to you.
We're going to talk a little bit about the returning carbon back to the earth.
As we know, the exchange of carbon between the geologic solid earth, the biosphere,
the hydrosphere, the atmosphere is common in the earth and it's done routinely.
But as we all know, humans have knocked this out of kilter and we need to accelerate the return of carbon back to the earth.
And this can be done through a number of ways. And we're to describe this in this talk.
So I'm going to start things off with the a bit of an introduction and go through sort of the need.
My colleague Joe is going to talk about the successes we've had and how how it can be done in a worldwide sense.
And then finally, my colleague Tom is going to talk about some of the challenges.
These challenges are opportunities. They're surmountable. But they are challenges that we need to be aware of.
Right. Right from the onset. So Steve said this this idea of this need for CO2 capture utilisation and storage or CCD,
US has been around for a while and it's part of any scenario to actually achieve net zero.
And most of you're probably familiar with these mitigation wedges based on this early, early work by Parklawn Sokolow.
And there's a number of different ways of presenting this.
But in this this slide, it's quite simple in that we can reduce CO2 emissions using things like renewables, nuclear, better energy efficiency.
But in any scenario, there is some court, some element of carbon capture and storage.
And so the real take home message is that there is no single silver bullet.
And number of these things have to be operate in concert with each other and says, yes, this is an essential ingredient in it.
And it's a bit of a daunting task. It's a doable task, but we have to be aware of the scale of what we're looking at.
So this slide on the left here, it shows CO2 capture and storage in megatons per year.
And we're on the left here.
And in 2020, get my mouth here really at the beginning of this this operation and the different colours are CO2 capture by industry.
So coal power, bioenergy or Becs, iron and steel, cement, gas, power, chemicals, gas processing, refining, pulp and paper.
So a whole range of of industries that are emitting high emitters of CO2, we need to capture that CO2 and do something with it.
And you can see the scale of what's required to get towards net zero at 2050.
This slide on the right of the left, most infographics shows this broken down by, oh, ECD versus Nano ECD countries.
You can see as we move forward, this has to more and more involve the entire earth, not just the countries.
The graph on the on the right, again, shows the scale of what we're looking at in 2020.
We've captured 40 megatons per year. That's what we're capturing.
And by 2050, we have to be at these tours of magnitude higher.
And the amount of capturing and again, the different symbols and colours here show the wide range of industries.
And one of these. Shown on here is is actually direct air capture and storage.
As as Tim Kruger talked to. This is his seminar a few few weeks ago.
And this just illustrates this again. These are a bit difficult to read.
The small fingers on the left here.
But essentially, these are different types of industry from natural gas processing, fertiliser production, all the way up to cement production.
And you can see back here in the 70s, really,
CO2 capture is being used primarily by the oil and gas industry for processing and even enhanced oil recovery.
And as we move forward from 2020, we have to we have to cover a lot more industries in this than this quest.
So what are we looking at? Really, quite simply. So there's this sort of four stages really.
We have to, first of all, capture the CO2 and that's not really what we're going to talk about so much.
This this can be captured from biomass or fossil fuel powered power stations, industrial facilities, or even directly capture from the air.
Then when you've got that CO2, what do you do with it? Well, it can be used as feedstock in services and other industries.
More we're interested in what are talking about is actually transporting it to a
spot where we're going to sequester it in the subsurface or on the right here.
The transport can be, if we're lucky, it's a short distance, but sometimes we have to pipe the CO2 or ship it or send it by road and rail.
And this challenge is there. And then when we start to sequester or store it and injected underground,
we can put it into a range of areas, salines, formations, depleted oil and gas fields.
The oil industry for some time now is used that CO2 to enhance oil recovery.
So basically to make once you've got an existing oil and gas field to make it more efficient, it can be injected into coal beds to produce methane.
And it also can be injected into other rock formations to react with the rock.
And what we're primarily going to talk about in this today is really these talk to injecting into sideline formations and depleted oil and gas fields.
So here's here's a graphics. This can be done a graphical description of that.
This can be done offshore. So, for example, an offshore rig could be producing natural gas.
That's rich in CO2. The CO2 get extracted from it and then it can get injected back into depleted oilfields or saline aquifers.
Same process can be done on land. And as I said, it can also be injected into shallower coal formations where we don't mind the coal,
but we take the methane out as the coal reacts with the CO2.
Here's an example. This is the world's first commercial CCW project.
It's called Aqua Store and it's based in southern Saskatchewan. In Canada, a the SS Powers Boundary Dam power plant is shown here on the right.
The CO2 it is is captured. It's a coal power plant.
And the CO2 it produces is captured.
And then it's piped along this red line a few kilometres away to a field, a wellhead where it's injected deep into the earth.
And if you look on the left,
you can see the stratigraphy of the formations that the the pass through en route to where the CO2 is finally sequestered.
So it's looking at depths of three kilometres, going through numerous different stratigraphic formations,
saline aquifers, existing oil, gas reservoirs. And these these reservoirs have existed for hundreds and billions of years.
So we expect the CO2 to stay secure in this this very, very deep reservoir where it's injected.
One of the interesting aspects of this and one of the challenges really in CCF is that today there's not been that much CO2,
but it's been very successfully injected, but not the volumes of not being.
But they really wanted and that's because CO2 is such a valuable resource for other other industries.
They gain one of the economic challenges. So how do how do we ensure that the CO2 is trapped in geologic formations?
Well, first of all, it's not we breathe out CO2 and it's very light.
And in a gas form. But we inject it deep in the earth in what's called a supercritical state.
So it's like a liquid and it can flow through that formation, finding gaps, nooks and crannies to store itself.
It's important to recognise that we're not injecting this CO2 into large swimming pool like storage cabins,
rejecting into rocks that are a bit like dense sponges.
And they're both permeable Permian permeable and porous. And they hold can hold a lot of fluids.
So we need, first of all, some sort of trapping mechanism.
And these are well known for for water reservoirs, saline aquifers, oil and gas reservoirs.
You need a good porous storage rock and then you need an impermeable, impermeable capping rock.
And this could be brought about by structural highs or it could be due to the juxtaposition of one type of geology against the other.
For example, across the fault that we get what are called residual trapping mechanisms as the as the CO2 moves through these formations,
the rock matrix. Some of it gets just trapped behind. We get solubility trapping where the CO2 reacts with the fluids as it moves through.
And then finally, we can get mineral trapping where the CO2 actually reacts with the rock itself.
And so it's important to remember, actually, that there are lots of natural CO2 reservoirs.
The Earth has produced through its time the very large reservoirs of CO2, which historically have been drilled for use in an industry.
So so once we get it back into the Earth, we expect it to stay there.
So the key ingredients to secure a CO2 storage, first of all, we need to have enough space.
And Joe is going to talk a little bit about that. We need to, Veltz, inject the CO2 into the reservoir as a suitable injection rates.
And Tom, Tom's going to discuss a bit of that. We want to store it securely.
We want to make sure it doesn't breach the containment reservoir that it's in.
And we want to be at a depth where we're injecting in supercritical state and territory to do this properly.
It requires us to model what's going to happen, monitor and then verify that it's there and not just immediately, but for for for many years forward.
That's that's a lot of what our research is on as these these aspects.
So I'll just show you an example where this has worked quite well. This is the Wayburn Mitel CCW project here.
CO2 is to gain in southern Saskatchewan and Canada. CO2 came from a coal gasification plant in Beulah, North Dakota.
And it was piped over 200 kilometres across the US Canada border to Wayburn.
And it was injected to a depth of nearly three kilometres in the Wayburn Mitel field.
This is an old oil and gas field that's been in production since the late 1950s,
had nearly 44 million tons of CO2 has been stored since this project started.
This is equivalent to emissions from a half a million cars per year.
Another side is in Algeria. This is the solid Kretschmer Field.
This is the third largest gas field in Algeria, which is a very large oil and gas producing country.
And here this gas is very rich in CO2. So the CO2 is captured and then injected into the water leg of the formation here.
It wasn't quite as smooth as as the waiver model example.
Those issues with permeability and connexion between the water and the gas like and see CO2 injection in this field is stopped.
But still four million tons of CO2 have been stored in this reservoir.
Here's a map of current the current state of affairs in terms of carbon capture and storage.
Red commercial CCW facilities in operation. Are construction blue or those development pinker ones where operations have been
suspended because of economic and political factors heavily influenced this.
A few years ago, we saw a bit of a downturn in CCE activities.
Fortunately, things are picking up. Boy, you can see from this map is really dominated by North America,
Western Europe to some extent, Eastern Asia, a bit of Australia and the Middle East.
But really, as I said in the introduction, we need this to start CCF, CPS operations across the world, actually, in terms of European projects.
One of the most high profile ones right now is on the right here, the the Norwegian Northern Lights Project,
which is the consortium of joint industry project that will inject CO2 into a field in the North Sea.
And this will take CO2 from a whole range of sources around this region in the UK.
The UK government has been investing very heavily in projects.
One is the net zero side where this will be the world's first zero carbon industrial hub.
By 2030, the CO2 will be captured from a range of industries, including hydrogen production,
and then piped off shore either to as far as the Northern Lights site, but also to the endurance site, which I haven't accurately put where that is.
But that's roughly where it is. The endurance site where I'll be injected and the subsurface in this area.
Some of the projects that we're involved with here in Oxford, for example, are are funded through accelerating CBS U.S. Technology ACTC programme.
One is called Digimon, which is looking at new digital monitoring solutions for CO2 storage sites.
And one that's under consideration right now is Consortium, a collaboration of countries around the North Sea looking at the effects of stress,
history and GM mechanics to reduce risk in these sort of in any of these storage sites.
So at this stage, just, you know, the take home message is basically to prove proof of concepts have been established.
And what's really need is an urgent need to scale things up. And we also urgently need to start diversifying industrial complication, for example,
you know, addressing the use of coking coal in mining as a good example.
We feel that we need to collaborate with the oil and gas industry.
They have the experience, the knowledge and the technology to to to do this on a commercial scale.
And upfront research and development is really required just to make sure that we know dearest things as much as possible.
So that I'm going to hand over to Joe Cartwright, who's going to talk about the next the next section.
Thanks, Mike. So as as Mike mentioned in his introduction, there are two principal options at the moment.
There are others, but we are focussing on these two.
So line aquifer's on the left, graphic and depleted oil and gas fields on the right.
So little bit of simple geology for you.
The salen aquifers different from the depleted oil and gas fields in as much as it hasn't had oil or gas produced from that aquifer,
aquifer and reservoir, a sort of synonyms for the purposes of this talk.
And reservoirs, aquifers are porous rocks, as Mike said, with the additional property that they have good permeability,
the ability of fluids to flow through them in the right kind of timescales.
You also need to have rEU good Caprock, as Mike has mentioned.
So the main difference then between the left and the right hand cross sections looking
down there is the depth at which we're injecting in the depleted oil and gas fields.
It tends to be deeper in that particular example from southern France, onshore southern France.
The oil and gas field was in a highly faulted region, very structurally deformed, and was at a depth of 4000 metres.
Whereas on the left, your schematic there gives a typical shallow, say, an aquifer at a depth of about a thousand metres.
And what you need then is the right geological context, proximity to the emitters.
You need loads of data to characterise your site.
And it's helpful if you've already got a lot of hardware in place, existing wells, pipelines, other infrastructure.
Those will all be factored into the the final validity of viability of a project.
Next one, please. My.
So just to be clear about what porosity is and permeability, these are the two main requirements for a reservoir, for a storage site.
And that picture on the left is a picture of some sand grains in a sandstone.
So that would be a typical ethology in a reservoir. And the grains are typically about a millimetre in diameter.
And the image on the right is a thin section. So that's a slice through the rock that's viewed under a microscope.
The grains are white, quite rounded, elliptical in shape.
And the blue is the poor space. And that is void space through which the CO2 will flow.
But it will have to displace water as it does. It's typically this void space, 30 percent to down to 10 in the target range of one to three.
The void space decreases downwards. So the shallower ones, shallower sites have better pore space.
The deeper ones, lower pore space, which also is a factor to be weighed up in choosing which kind of target depth to aim for.
And importantly, the void geometry defines the permeability.
So it's the ability of the fluids to flow through these tiny little nooks and crannies which controls the ability to get the CO2 into the formation.
And I can illustrate that on the next slide.
With a couple of images from current research, this is an area of active research to define the physical properties of potential storage reservoirs,
we can use X-ray tomography on our reservoir samples if we are able to access them from pre-existing boreholes.
And that allows a stand to compute the poor space and how it interconnects.
So A is a picture of the Tomáš gram of the grains and B is an image computer reconstructed image of the poor space and bottom right.
You can see the fluid flow path through a typical sandstone reservoir.
The ball's there being the grains of sand. And then those arrows, curvilinear arrows, are the the fluid flowing through that.
So with these kinds of computer assisted techniques, we can predict a great deal about the reservoir performance under a CO2 injection experiment.
And that's exactly what people are doing. Next one, please. So depleted oil and gas fields.
Well, as the term suggests, they are sites of former oil or gas exploitation.
There will be plenty of boreholes. There will be an awful lot of data because oil and gas fields require a lot of investment.
So huge amounts of data is is acquired prior to drilling those.
And that sort of database is essential to really characterise a site underground to dispose of CO2.
So you can take that box, you'll have loads of data. It'll be close to pipelines.
There'll be infrastructure in place.
And these huge databases of wells, core and seismic, will reassure folks that we've characterised the reservoir and its geological context.
In addition, though, you also get production history.
We know how the reservoir will have behaved over the lifespan of the field, which may well have been 30 to 40 years.
And that gives added input into models.
Predicting how it will behave on the CO2 injection gives a really firm constraint on the likely injectivity history.
On the slight negative side, these oil and gas fields are often deep.
They're structurally deformed. They have higher in situ formation pressures.
And they may well be faults, as in this example from southern Australia.
They will also have lower porosity and permeability and therefore lower storage capacity.
So all these factors need to be weighed up when choosing what type of geological option to go for.
Incidentally, this one was onshore in the state of Victoria and South Australia,
and there was a great deal of collaboration between all the stakeholders and the company responsible for disposing of this CO2.
So it was as much a success from a stakeholder involvement,
from a transparency point of view as it was from a technical point of view, but relatively small amounts.
Only tens of thousands of kilotons were stored in the period during which this project was in operation.
Next one, please. So very briefly, a global look here at some very large numbers view these are millions of tons.
And this is the calculated storage capacity for depleted oil and gas fields.
But scale that up by at least an order of magnitude, if not to, for the storage capacity in shallow salines, aquifers.
On the next slide, you'll see. The calculated storage capacity for sale on aquifers in the conterminous United States,
the 48 states, and you can see that the total number there is about 100 gigatons.
Thinking back to the requirement to store a trillion tonnes, then the US can potentially store a really serious fraction of that.
So huge amounts of geological investigation has gone into calculating these numbers.
But the ability to do so has largely benefited from the fact that there's been a huge
amount of oil and gas exploration in these very same areas over the last century,
actually in the United States. Next one, please. So back in our own backyard here off of the North Sea bass and off the east coast of the U.K.,
huge number of potential storage sites documented by the BGA s of a variety of types,
both the depleted fields and the sideline aquifers in the different symbols there.
And with the ability to store thousands and thousands of megatons.
So the shallow sale on aquifers in particular give us great optimism for our capabilities of storing serious quantities.
Next slide. And if we look at the North Sea, it out also has one of the longest running, if not the long,
longest running project, CO2 injection project, which is the slight in a field.
So I'll spend a few minutes talking about that.
It's stored at a depth of about 800 to 1000 metres in a sandstone reservoir, which is deposited over a huge area of the central North Sea.
And it's stored around about 20 megatons at the moment.
And about one million tonnes per annum. Next slide, please.
And that's the kind of graphic showing exactly what's envisaged here in this sort of operation from a platform, a pre-existing oil and gas platform.
One of the boreholes has gone down and injected CO2 targeted that you'd see the formation where
you can see the plume in those little blue cylinders feeding the layers of the reservoir in red.
And that plume has been expanding and has been monitored over the last 20, 20 years or so at about one megatons per annum.
So this has huge storage capacity. It's geologically young and very simple.
So it has predictable behaviour.
And the shallow means that there's relatively low injection pressures, which reduces the risk of anything going wrong on injection.
And there are very few faults around this particular neck of the woods.
So that's another added advantage. Next one, please.
And this is a geological cross section of that reservoir that you'd see your
Issan sitting at about 800 metres depth in the centre of that cross section.
The panels about 100 kilometres across.
So straightaway you can see from those boreholes which calibrate the position of that reservoir and give us his properties.
You can see it's a laterally extensive reservoir, which is a big plus for shallow sailin aquifers.
They're generally really large in their aerial extent and therefore large in their storage capacity.
Next one, please. And another essential ingredient to make this work is, of course, data availability.
It will be really, really difficult to mount CO2 injection into the subsurface unless you have a huge amount of seismic data.
And this image here is one such seismic profile from the area of the slightness field showing the CO2 plume on the bottom right of that image.
And just in case you've not encountered one of these seismic profile is like having a a scan through the Earth equivalent to a sort of a C.T. scan.
And we're able to record the geological layering. And you can see geological features, including the very bright reflections.
Those are those bright colours in the bottom right, which are a manifestation of the actual injected CO2.
So you are physically using the seismic data.
We can plot the best site to locate the injection wells and we can eliminate the risk or mitigate the risk,
reduce the risk of any of the CO2 leaking by increasing our geological knowledge of the overburden rocks and documenting all of the features.
And those some of those are labelled there in that image.
And furthermore, we can repeat the seismic experiment every few years and monitor precisely how the CO2 is moving in the subsurface.
And on the next slide, you can see exactly that.
So those are repeat seismic images taken from the slightness injection site through time,
through the history of the project, showing in the bottom image, the vertical cross section through the injection.
And you can see how that changes year on year. And that's the CO2 plume migrating, ascending, spreading laterally.
And that's capture very graphically in the image at the top, which shows in a map form the expansion of the plume.
And those colours represent the intensity of the CO2 injected.
So the seismic capability allows us to monitor really rather precisely how the CO2 is moving.
In addition to preconditioning the optimal place for risking the site appropriately and within regulatory boundary conditions.
Next one, please. And I should say that in reflecting back on the availability of data, really,
the oil industry has invested huge amounts because it's a commercial enterprise.
But then the CO2 injection industry to follow will benefit from legacy data, which amounts to trillions of dollars in value.
So I think we start from a very strong position about knowing our subsurface and geological knowledge.
As I show you, hope, hopefully, as I've shown you, is absolutely vital for characterising both the reservoir and the seal.
But I'm sure that Tom will expand much more on some of these topics and also point out some of the pitfalls, because we have to be aware of those.
So over to you, Tom. Thanks.
Thanks. Yeah. So, yeah, we are going to be discussing the risks and the challenges as mikes of grew up and as Mike and Joe really nicely teed up,
what I'm going to discuss here. So next slide.
So I'm going to be discussing make many just five points pretty much.
And and like I said, making Joseph touched on these.
So we're going to wear the injectivity defamer, those in just a second. The induced seismicity.
So the earthquakes, you may generate that small tremors, maybe the leakage risk.
How to monitor these sites in it? A little more detail. But I you sort of summarising how much monitoring it does take.
And then it's of roughly touching on the costs and scaling up as well. So next slide.
So first off, this injectivity following on from what Joe was talking about in terms of the porosity and permeability of the formations.
Injectivity is simply how much Ray and volumes. Can you actually inject into the reservoir?
Once you've Gerrold the well and once you've characterised everything. So is this in this schematic on the right.
Is this little animation saying I wish. Can you actually supply.
And that actually as Mike sort of touched one in a necklace store and other sites that you delivered to the C.A.T.,
you can be a real pinch point that you actually see.
It was very difficult to acquire due to the just the demand for it from enhanced
or recovery than other things that can affect the reservoir performance.
The injectivity,
which says the reservoir performance about these these things are going on in this in the reservoir as you're trying to actually put the CO2 in place.
Some examples area from slightness. The initial injection rates are actually 10 percent of that.
What they wanted to say or any on the order of a few hundred kilotons is peaceful megaton per year due to sand intruding into the well.
So the sand screens, as a result of putting CO2 into the reservoir, are reacting to that CO2.
And then in Suva, another North Sea NBCC rays were the geological barriers.
The pressure was building up. The CO2 was migrating through the rock and then hitting a geological barrier.
And the reservoir was more compartmentalised than they originally imagined.
And that led to pressure differences that they had to then adapt and work around.
But it's still limited. The injectivity and like Joe said,
is this poor scale behaviour of the way the chemical reactions can occur between the CO2 and the rock and the reservoir rock itself,
which can limit the permeability or change the permeability throughout the injection.
One of these is so precipitation, like so precipitating in the formation itself as a result of the CO2 near the well.
Thermal effects can also change the permeability as well as a result of your pumping cold CO2 into a relatively
warm reservoir that can fracture the rock and cause contraction and that can change the how much you can inject.
So all of these are tiny, dependent problems which affect the reservoir pressure.
So you can see on that thing you have this bottom hole pressure. PVH and these things change with time and the amount that you can inject.
And you have to constantly monitor these things in response and look at the response of the reservoir.
So next slide. Moving on to induce those mistakes.
This is their full activation or so of putting fluid into the ground, putting the CO2 into the ground.
And so within the reservoirs of near where you're actually putting all of that CO2 in place,
you're increasing the pressure by putting more fluid in and that can cause Foltz to be reactivated or actually meeting that increased pressure.
But a more distant go, you're increasing that reservoir of pressure that can actually act to inflate a functionally the reservoir.
And that the rocks of the reservoir pushing against the surrounding rocks can induce what's called a poor or elastic effect,
where the stress change in the reservoir is propagating further outside of the reservoir.
And that can also activate folks as well. But when you actually inject any kind of fluid into the subsurface, you get some amount of seismicity.
And most of the time this is quite small. You can cannot be felt on the surface called micro seismic events.
That cannot be felt. It usually acts as quite helpful diagnostic to look at where fluids and propagating or
where fractures are moving and things like fractures are opening and things like that.
Well, see, when the event starts then fell and he said become larger. That can inhibit many operations as it has in the past.
And so one example on the right is a can store the gas storage projects on the off the coast of Spain.
It's around 20 kilometres offshore. You see the macro.
This is a seismic has it not been in in a region which it doesn't have a lot of seismic has if they if you will,
put this gas storage product here and only a few weeks,
tens and tens of days into the injection programme, they start to get larger and larger seismic events above two,
which is two, is roughly where you can start to feel events on the surface to three.
And then and then it would go out to four and a half. These were widely felt across these towns.
Next to the site. And that was that put an end to the project and as a result of this full activation as they were storing gas.
And another example is, as Steve mentioned, the beginning is the Blackpool hydraulic fracturing in press.
The new road in it last year even put a stop to the hydraulic fracturing operations there.
And now and now, the government has imposed a moratorium on drilling fracturing as a result of the seismicity concerns.
So clearly, full activation is a big risk to social social licence.
You want people to support the project you want. You want people to understand why you're doing it.
And you want people to be not disturbed by it. And for information can also be a big risk to the wellbore integrity.
So it is a result of folks slipping. You can do stress changes which may cause the well to be damaged.
And we obviously want to make sure we're keeping the well in perfect condition and to inject CO2 as safely as possible.
And another risk is from this induced seismicity cases.
If a fault passes through that structural seal that we've discussed for the last in the last you talk some and it's reactivated,
it can potentially act as a hydraulic conduit. It can allow fluid to flow through it and then potentially be a risk to reservoir integrity.
So next light. So this as I move it, going onto that potential leakage risk.
You can have this seal rupture where fluids are able to pass through that structure as CEOs throws a few things.
So full activation, as I just said, the development of fractures and in is natural fractures may exist in that structure will seal.
Again, natural fractures that may result in that structure of a seal.
But then ah then ah. So activate it in a sense by by the introduction of CO2 and then allow fluid to flow for them.
Or potentially then that compartmentalisation like a set of Snover earlier, that unexpected reservoir pressures that can then lead to see a rupture.
So this is the results of this may lead to deep brines or CO2 breaching that storage complex that you want.
And then in the worst case scenario, I see that up and reaching the sea floor. So these are these deep brines.
These contain heavy metals. And the CO2 itself, you know, would induce if they did reach the sea floor,
rapid changes in fairly localised changes in water, salinity, acidity and temperature.
So that would naturally affect any life that was around then.
And we can see the endurance side here, this blue dot on this map of the North Sea.
This is a water that met the bathymetry. And you can see it in the water depth in this location is in your eyes or 50 metres deep.
And so with this with these shallow waters,
which are would you have life in them if the result of a leak could potentially be could affect a wider area,
as well as sort of the mixing of the oceans in this area?
And really, the whilst experiments are being done and research being done on the effect of CO2 on a CO2 leak,
these effects aren't wholly understood and how they would actually affect a wider system if if a leak did occur.
How it affect the whole of the areas is not widely understood. So next slide.
And so that kind of brings me on to the to the monitoring challenge.
So if we've got inducers Misty and there's this leakage risk and, you know, how do we how do we detect that?
How do we how do we gather? And as Joe is mentioned and Mike mentioned,
the this GMAC GM mechanical modelling prior to any injection occurring is it is a vast undertaking in itself.
And as Joe mentioned, we've got a lot of data that is going to constrain these models.
But you as you continually inject as you start to inject and as you continue to collect more and more data,
you have to update these models perpetually to update our understanding of how the reservoir is reacting to any kind of injection.
And there are many methods used to do that. So microseismic monitoring, say, looking for small earthquakes to track,
like I said, track the fluid migration or Foat reactivation or anything like that.
Now, fibre optic sensing, so you fibre optic cables are down the well itself,
which can measure strain in the well and as well and as much and temperature as well.
You have these seismic imaging, these reflexion seismic images that Joe mentioned which can look at plume growth and and identify faults,
pre-existing faults prior to operations,
your gravity measurements, which can also track the plane and actually measure tiny adjustments in gravity and see where the plume is going.
And then looking at the geochemistry, the surface water in the flowback geochemistry is.
And then you say that final part I just discussed that in the leakage, we're actually detecting CO2 on the seafloor itself.
And these are also summarise risks of cost benefit plot. But generally, employing a lot of these techniques is a very, very large of,
you know, tens of kilometres square areas is expensive and is and is difficult.
It's technically challenging. And so if we're going to upscale this to hundreds of thousands of reservoirs around the world,
we need to work out what techniques give us the biggest bang for our buck.
What what what do we need to get to a fuller good understanding as we as we require
to ensure reservoir integrity and ensure that we know where the fluid is going?
They waste money, innocence.
And obviously, if we do collect all of this data is very large volumes that they are their own needs to be integrated into one consistent picture.
And that's a tap that is a technical challenge to just have all of that data and try and integrate into what?
Into a single into a single picture. So next.
Q So leaving on just from that point is you can say that this is an expensive task to monitor,
but roughly what kind of scaling up is required for geologic see CO2 storage and how much would that cost?
So we have a global CO2 emissions around around 35 gigatons per year or something like that and put it in the U.K. context,
US 350 megatons per year, approximately. And as Jay mentioned,
a slight married's of successful projects like Wayburn successful injection rate would be something on the order of above one megaton per year.
And so if you just rough back of the envelope calculation, here it is, you need thousands of projects globally to offset all CO2 emissions.
So obviously, that's not that's not a solution. This is not a silver bullet.
To Endou emission and then Endou emissions.
But it needs to be combined with an overall reduction in emissions.
We need to be a much more efficient society and much less polluting society, General.
But this can help offset that. That last part. And then so and to put it back into context is most of our film,
the costs that the endurance site off the coast of the homicide area is around one gigatons of storage,
crusty's around gigaton, probably a bit less than that.
And the cost of CCW as it as it currently stands, is of current estimates are between so 50 to 80 dollars per ton.
That's the entire process of capturing it. Transporting it and then storing it will be around 50 tons per ton.
So, you know, we're talking billions of dollars for the overall project. Millions of dollars per year for each individual project.
And if you then scale up for even more projects to be, you know, naturally even larger, much larger sums.
But consider and just put this in context, the capital investment in offshore oil and gas is something on the order of 30 billion dollars per year.
And so, you know, these aren't massively different scales of spending. So just final slide.
So I think just to end on a really hope on a hopeful note, I've sort of summarised all of the columns to Joe's prove his innocence.
But really, if you go through each of these points, there's a lot there's a lot that we do know and there's a lot of ways that we can solve it.
So for the injectivity, we've learnt a lot from these previous CCE projects,
as well as Orefield management and one hundred and decades and decades of GM mechanics and data
that we have on oil and gas fields and the way rocks behave at depth and how to pump fluid,
how to extract or eject fluids into them. So we have that data and only do so as we see point.
We can identify it through monitoring and modern techniques of forecasting and mitigation.
Practises are being developed and so are possible.
We know that we can work out ways to avoid activating faults and what we can do is try and get around that on the leakage side.
There are many monitoring tools available as well. Those are being developed currently as well by numerous groups and actually
understanding the full effects of the leak on them on the on an eco system.
Because right now they suggest they're quite localised, but the full effects need to be further understood.
But those can be understood through the research. And that's that's ongoing on the monitoring side.
We can streamline that. We can find out what is the most cost effective approach through research as well.
That's what w what we do. Alex food is that our group does in a sense.
And this these big data volumes,
this integrated approach can be helped with modern processing techniques such as machine learning and things like that.
And like I said, the similar risk cost in scale is very similar to that of oil and gas investment and with incentives.
This is an achievable problem. And with the correct with the scaling up the wind patterns,
we are sure that economies of scale will kick in and this thing will get cheaper as you try to as it as this gets developed and used around the world.
So that's that's us. Thank you, Mike and Tom and Joe.
That's fantastic. Let's go to questions now.
I've certainly learnt a lot. I've I've heard a lot of discussion about the urgency of scaling up.
And there are a lot of uncertainties. But it was really interesting to see just a wealth of data that's already out there on carbon storage.
And that I think, Tom, you led us quite nicely to was the most popular question, actually, from Rosalind Ken.
Thank you, Rosalind. Can carbon sequestration be done in time?
I think you indicated that, you know, by some metrics at least,
we're talking about scaling up an industry to the Scott, that to the size of the current oil and gas industry,
essentially from from something that exists but is currently much smaller scale, you know, within just a few short decades.
So. Mike, Joe and Tom,
do you have particular views on whether whether that is genuinely achievable or what was the critical thing to be done if it is to be achieved?
I mean, it's a very good question. I think it is.
It is imminently achievable. I mean, we've done. I mean, Tim Krueger's talking use the analogy of the vaccine.
Very successfully. And we have incredibly quickly. And I think if there's a you know, there's clearly a need for this.
So and I think technologically there's an ability.
So I am confident we can do it if we put the time and resources to.
Jerry, if you've had experience working in the sector yourself, so do you share that view?
Yes, I do. I think we should remember that an awful lot of the oil and gas infrastructure in the world is owned by national governments.
Eighty seven percent. So I'm sure I mean, there are very positive soundings coming from the big oil companies,
but they only represent 13 percent of all of our infrastructure and know how.
So I do think this is an international effort. The intergovernmental levels.
That's required to get the cooperation from from everybody involved.
But as regards shareholders, private companies, we know that, you know, the relationship is the one is beholden to the other.
So corporate social responsibility is playing the increasing role.
So I'm sure that, you know, with the right incentives, it can't be done, you know, philanthropically by the oil industry.
But it could be done for essentially operating costs or just something a little bit above very modest profit margin.
So but that is going to take the consumer to be willing to pay for it.
And that has to be a transnational efforts and price setting.
Tom, I mean, you are fairly optimistic.
I think you ended on a fairly optimistic note that it could be scaled up, but he gave a sort of long list of things that that need to be put in place.
Would you have a particular priority amongst those? So you say only to happen at the same time?
Well, I think the a lot of the monitoring all plays into into each region, each point.
So, you know, you're doing the monitoring. And it's not just for one aspect of it.
You're doing the monitoring that helps in every way. The. He said that it to scale this up.
We're talking about earnings. You know, you need to we need to work out ways to to apply this in the most efficient way possible,
because if we're going to scale this up around the world,
we need it to be affordable by effort, by not just, you know, Western Europe and by states needs to be applied around the world.
So that's equality of opportunity around the world needs to be in place as well.
So that's another factor. But I think in terms of something.
One thing to focus on, I think, you know, with the monitoring in place, you can you can get a lot of you don't need to focus.
You can look at each of these points at the same time and sort of make a wholesale assessment.
And that's the safest thing to do. Just leading on from that, we've had several questions,
which gets at the sort of transition of where carbon capture and storage in the oil and gas industry
is today to where it needs where we need to pay for a sort of genuinely net zero compliance society.
So there's some questions about the fact that you gave the example of the Boundary Dam coal plant and the fact that actually
the costs of solar and other technologies mean should we really be looking at the use of CCW for coal in the long run or not?
Tim Kruger, hello, timmers as chips. And a question about is,
is the is the suggestion or the current sort of look at CCSVI enhanced oil recovery helping or hindering the long run scaling of CCAR?
And we've talked a lot in general about the involvement of the oil and gas sector in scaling this up.
So. Do you have thoughts on whether the current framing of CCSVI is the right one in order to get it scale and how we can actually achieve that?
Efficiency is sort of threading a needle in a way, isn't it? Of working with the oil and gas sector to scale this up,
but at the same time recognising that the uses in the long run of success might be very different to where we put them in the near-term.
I don't know if I can tell you all your thoughts, but maybe, Mike, if you want to lead off on that one and then feel free to chip in.
No, again, it's a really good point. I mean, it will.
The framing of it will have to change. Most definitely. And hopefully there won't be a need for CO2 capture.
Coal power plant to your is is a way you once you drill the well and you're producing oil and gas.
I would argue environmentally you're better off using that to get everything out of it before you go to another spot and drill.
So even though in the long term we have to diminish use of fossil fuels,
once we actually have right now, we can use it in a more environmentally effective way.
But then equally, as we move into these other technologies where we capture CO2 like Dark's and Bak's or the big
challenge of capturing CO2 associated with either making hydrogen or with the mining industry,
you're still going to have to do something with that CO2.
And that's still going to involve all the processes we described of storing it and sequestering it in geologic reservoir.
So I agree that the drivers and the framing will change.
But you're still left with, you know, technically putting CO2 in the ground.
Say, nodding heads is nothing else to add to that one. Okay, great.
Thank you very much for that. Let's move on to another question and we'll try and squeeze in as many as we've got time for.
Kevin Brigden asks, what evidence is there to show that stored CO2 remains stored for the necessary timescale?
I mean, if we're talking about permanent net zero course, that needs to be millennia.
And I think you show quite a lot of data which suggests that, you know, in this in the projects we have, it's looking pretty good.
But of course, they are a period of few decades at most.
So are you confident or are there still remaining question marks about whether it really stays there permanently?
She lightship on chipin on that.
CO2 and S.H. for not the same, but at a first approximation, the fact that gas is stayed underground in the form of methane for millions of years.
Gives us some security or about the geological time scale.
There are also CO2 accumulations, as Mike mentioned.
And those have also been in place for millions of years. That's not to say some of that gas hasn't leaked and leakage is inevitable.
The earth is a sieve, you know, with different meshes. So we shouldn't expect there to be no leakage.
But the natural system is also very good at dealing with leakage.
It can be fixed in different ways.
Some of it, inevitably, as part of the carbon cycle, makes it naturally through to the earth's surface and into shallow aquifers.
There's a natural flux of CO2 and hydrocarbons.
So I think the fact from thousands and thousands of examples of long term residents in gas fields that we can be fairly sure
that we know a reasonable amount about the sort of sealing conditions to say that it will be secure for a few thousand years.
How you define secure is another matter.
If you're absolutist about it and say there should be no leakage and you enshrine that in law, this won't happen.
You know, it's simply not possible in a natural system where there are small voids in
sediments for no leakage to occur and leakage occurs by diffusion all the time.
But leakage by adverse action by actual flow also occurs as long as the rate is manageably
small and doesn't lead to significant pollution of the water column or of the atmosphere.
If these are on land leakages, then we're fine. But I go back actually to reports in the Bible of the burning bush.
We now think that that was actually a natural methane leakage.
So human beings have understood about the natural leakage from underground reservoirs for a long, long time.
So we shouldn't be absolutists. Otherwise, we kill it dead. Stress testing.
I'm going to try and squeeze in two or three questions, so we'll go for some brief answers if possible.
One of them was actually groundwater, which you just mentioned, Joe. And I think you and Tom maybe touched on this as well as seismicity.
But Amalia asks, are there negative effects of carbon sequence sequestration on groundwater quality and can that affect water security?
I know that's a concern that has sort of come up in the social discussion around some of these activities, along with the risk of earthquakes.
So do either of you want to say something on that? Sure, yeah.
Yeah. This this comes up frequently, I try to be brief, this comes up frequently,
especially with things like hydraulic fracturing or fracking is that, you know, is a risk that the groundwater.
And I think it's important to stress the this the sense of scale that we're talking about here between a thousand kilometres.
And so, you know, between a thousand and three thousand metres below the surface, groundwater is generally, you know,
where we have wells really into freshwater aquifers are on the order of it, you know, on the Deep Eastern, a few hundred metres deep.
So it's really ten times deeper than any kind of groundwater. So the where it where you may get any kind of pollution is where the well goes through.
There's freshwater aquifers and you don't adequately seal the well, you don't case it well enough with concrete and steel.
And so the we in the in Europe, you know,
there's a lot of regulation around how well you case these and how we you ensure reservoir well integrity, wellbore integrity.
Whereas, you know, in places with less regulation, that could be an issue where, you know, you're not insuring that, but with adequate regulation,
then it's it's it's we are we are perfectly capable of keeping wells sealed and with no pollution into the surrounding groundwater.
OK. We've had a few questions about the energy and the costs involved in carbon capture and storage.
Maybe so. Nicholas Watts asks, How does the cost of a tonne of carbon stored compare with the cost of a tonne of carbon emissions avoided,
for example, through behaviour change? So maybe if I just address that one very quickly, Tom, I think you gave some numbers, actually, didn't you,
for carbon capture being in the range of 50 to 80 dollars a tonne, perhaps for sort of industrial and power applications?
We know that for direct air capture as well, that that's currently probably in the hundreds and perhaps it might get down with deployment.
Two hundred or if we're being optimistic, closer to one hundred dollars per tonne.
So the short answer is that's that's higher than a lot of other measures we can do.
So shifting to renewables in the power sector, some other behaviour changes we can make.
But is lower than some of the other really difficult things to do. And that's why that's the discussion.
My guess at why it comes out in Pathway's is being part of the solution. Carbon capture and storage.
I'm just going to finish, though, conscious. We're running over time. But this is a great question from Lydia.
And maybe this is a good one for you or with your academic geological hats on.
She says, is all this technical investment really needed? Can we just plant trees and harvest them and bury them?
Does that you know what?
On the timescales we're talking about achieve things much more easily and efficiently than than building up this major new industry?
She's as we've been flying to the moon, while there are desperately important basics we need to tackle on Earth.
So how would you answer that question? That's a tough one.
I mean, basically, there's there's not enough room for four trees to do.
To do it with what's described. I mean, that's the whole. That's what I said at the beginning.
There isn't one silver bullet.
And almost any scenario, especially as you look across all the industries that are producing CO2, we will need some form of CO2 capture and storage.
And Becks is a good example. We can plant the trees and use them for fuel Drax Power Station and then, you know,
get a double whammy where we're pulling CO2 out of the air and we're sequestering it.
But it alone is not going to do it. I mean, Steve, you know better than the figures, and that would mean.
For those of you tuning in who haven't seen the whole series, you can find on YouTube the back and the back story and week two,
I think it was with Professor Natalie Seddon, an Cecil zero down all about nature based solutions.
And they talk about the many opportunities, but also the limitations of working with the biosphere to sequester carbon.
But we're over time now. It just remains for me to say.
Thank you very much to my Kendall, Joe Cartwright and Tom Cataldie for really fascinating presentation.
And thank you to all of you in the audience for joining us to.