Summary of policy background on CCS

GEO-SEQ is a public-private research and development partnership that will deliver the technology and information needed to enable the application of safe and cost-effective methods for geologic sequestration of CO2 by the year 2015. The GEO-SEQ R&D plan was developed to address the need for improved tools and technologies for cost optimisation, monitoring, modelling and capacity estimation. Taken together, significant advances in these areas will lay the foundation for providing safe and cost effective geologic sequestration technologies. The three-year project is funded through DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in the Office of Fossil Energy as part of the Department’s new initiative on the capture and storage of greenhouse gases.

The GEO-SEQ project was designed to achieve several significant benefits. These include: lowering sequestration costs by optimising technologies with collateral benefits to fossil fuel production, as well as understanding and optimising trade-offs between injection, transportation and separation costs; lowering sequestration risks by providing information needed to select sites, increasing confidence and safety by demonstrating innovative monitoring and tracking technologies, and enhancing performance assessment; decreasing time to implementation by pursuing early opportunities to do pilot tests and gain acceptance by the private sector; and gaining public acceptance.

Thus, the major deliverables of the applied R&D plan are:

• Methods to co-optimise value-added sequestration for oil and gas formations;
• Procedures for lowering the cost of sequestration by understanding the trade-offs among the costs of separation, compression, transportation and well-field and geologic considerations;
• An optimised set of monitoring technologies ready for full-scale field demonstration in three years in oil, gas, and brine formations, and two years later in coal formations;
• Improved capability of and confidence in computer simulation models for predicting the performance of CO2 sequestration in oil and gas, brine and coal bed formations;
• Improved methodology and information for assessing the sequestration capacity of oil, gas, brine and unminable coal formations

Project aims

To develop methods for the co-optimisation of value-added sequestration for oil and gas formations
To develop procedures for reducing costs associated with the technologies addressed
To optimise monitoring technologies for full-scale demonstration in various formations
To improve methodology and data for assessing formation capacities
To develop enhanced computer modelling capabilities

Purpose of work

Enhanced Commercial Production,Contribution Towards Solving Global Problem,Establishing New Industry

Project funding sources

US DoE and others

Expected key deliverables

Technical reports

Emissions source

N/A

Type of organisation

Industrial,University,National Laboratory

Related projects

Key project tasks

To develop methods to co-optimise value-added sequestration for oil and gas formations
To develop procedures for lowering the cost of sequestration
To optimise a set of monitoring technologies ready for full-scale field demonstration in oil, gas, brine formations, and coal formations;
To improve computer simulation models for predicting the performance of CO2 sequestration in oil and gas, brine and coal bed formations;
To improve methodology and data for assessing the sequestration capacity of various formations

Project links

Project details are given on the NETL website at: http://www.netl.doe.gov. A NETL factsheet on the project is available at www.netl.doe.gov/publications/factsheets/project/Proj287.pdf

GEO-SEQ Project website: http://www-esd.lbl.gov/GEOSEQ/ provides highlights, papers published, outreach activities, individual task summaries and quarterly progress reports.

A first year summary status report is available at : www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/1A2.pdf