About the project
CO2SafeQuest project aims at enhancing integrity risk assessment of CO2 storage sites containing faults and providing solutions to reduce fault’s risks of reactivation and leakage during CO2 storage operations, thus ensuring long term containment of the CO2 and security of the storage. This project especially aims at closing remaining gaps in understanding of the dynamic changes of fault zones by providing new experimental results and modeling workflows.
CO2SafeQuest has an overall objective to provide innovative and integrative workflows addressing the long-term confinement of CO2 in faulted sandstone storage sites taking into account fault behavior in reservoir, caprock and overburden. These innovative workflows including faults geo-characterization and simulation from meso to storage site scale will be designed on real use-case such as Smeaheia and Poseidon Norwegian storage site (provided by industrial partners for Poseidon and by open-access data for Smeaheia).
To tackle the overall objectives of the project CO2SafeQuest ambition, we aim to enhance fault risk assessment in CCS context by providing new data, new ways to simulate the fault behavior and integrated workflows. The project innovative aspects are to provide new data on fault characterization and fault behavior during CO2 injection at laboratory and meso-scale (WP2) ; upgrade numerical simulations of the faults behavior at meso and storage site scale and perform fault risk assessment of two industrial use case under primary evaluation stages, Poseidon and Smeaheia storages sites (WP3) ; provide integrative workflows going beyond actual standard for fault risk assessment from characterization to behavior evaluation (WP4) ; and finally to enhance fault risk communication toward industrials, regulators and relevant stakeholders and disseminate the project results (WP5). As social acceptance is a major hurdle to the development of CCS, especially regarding risk mitigation and communication, it is of utmost importance to participate to “strengthen public and stakeholder perception of CCS through education and information sharing”. To do so, a dedicated work package (WP5) will have the objective to share the project findings with CETP community, end-users (storage operators), stakeholders and regulators.
Overall, the project will enable to pass Fault characterization and risk assessment from TRL4 to TRL6. This will be achieved by providing new faults characterization and behavior data, constitutive laws and more general HM criterion for fault failure. These innovative results will be upscaled from lab scale to storage site scale on Poseidon and Smeaheia industrial use case to ultimately develop new workflows for fault risk assessment validated on these two storage sites. The guidelines for fault risk and safety towards industrial end-users, stakeholders and regulators will strengthen the implementation of CO2SafeQuest results and contribute to the success of Poseidon and Smeaheia storage, and more generally any other storage site development containing faults.
