CETP - Unravelling Faults properties and behavior for CO2 geological storage

CO2SafeQuest project aims to enhance risk assessment in CO2 storage evaluation, allowing to accelerate and secure CCS projects scale-up. The workflows and tools within this project will help industry to enhance the CO2 storage evaluation and operation design. One major concern to ensure sustainable long-term storage of CO2 is the behavior of fault and caprock. In order to prevent any leakage problem in the future and ensure a safe storage, it is important to better understand the fault geometry and properties in the subsurface. In this regard, it is necessary to bridge the gap between different scales of study from experiments to outcrop and seismic and finally reservoir scale. This interdisciplinary and innovative project brings together experts from academia, research institutes and industry to develop new datasets, improve the current hydromechanical models, identify the uncertainties and assess the risks. Therefore, the project would contribute to the CO2 storage derisking and opening new potential storage prospects and ultimately paving the way for the development of megaton scale CO2 storage by mid-2030.

CO2SafeQuest project aims at providing the workflows and the characterization and simulation tools needed to enhance fault behavior and risk assessment in CO2 storage evaluation, allowing to target more complex reservoir and so, accelerate and secure CCS projects scale-up. These workflows and tools will help industry to enhance the CO2 storage evaluation and operation design. To reach the overall objectives of the project, it is needed to set a bridge between the gap between different scales of fault study by providing suitable data and statistical correlations, and identify suitable hydromechanical models for faults at industrial CCS scale. This, to assess impact of uncertainties and quantify phenomenological impacts and leakage risk at reservoir scale, provide guidelines on fault modeling in an industrial CCS context and on how to calibrate model parameters based on geophysical measurements, laboratory data and analogue outcrop data. This project targets the CO2 storage part of the Call Module CM2023-04 on Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS). Unravelling faults properties and behavior in CO2 geological storage is mandatory to “faster scale up of CCS technologies and at lower risk” and “minimizing or avoiding adverse impact on human health and the environment of CO2 storage”, this will be done in this project through the development of innovative integrated workflows addressing the long term confinement of CO2 in faulted sandstone porous media. This project, through enhancing the CO2 storage derisking and opening new potential storage prospects, will participate to pave the way for the development of megaton scale CO2 storage by mid 2030.