CETP - Unravelling Faults properties and behavior for CO2 geological storage

The CO2SafeQuest projects aims to improve existing methods of assessing risks in CO2 storage related to geologic faults. Faults are a major concern for safe long-term storage of CO2 in the subsurface. They affect the caprock’s ability to seal the underground reservoir and the capacity of the reservoirs. If not properly assessed, faults may act as conduits for leakage. It is therefore important to understand their geometry and properties in the subsurface. There are still significant gaps in our knowledge to address, especially on faults at the scales between outcrop, reservoir, and seismic data. This interdisciplinary and innovative project brings together experts from both academia, research institutes, and industry. They will work together to develop new datasets, improve our current mechanical models, identify uncertainties, and assess the risks. With the workflows and tools developed from the project, the CCS industry will be able to enhance storage evaluations and operation design. Ultimately, CO2SafeQuest will therefore help accelerate the upscaling necessary for storing CO2 on the megaton-scale by the mid-2030s.

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.