DOE to invest $8.5 million in carbon storage research projects

Aug. 10, 2016
The US Department of Energy’s Fossil Energy Office reported it will make more than $8.5 million in investments in five carbon storage research projects. The commitments reflect FEO’s objective to deploy and validate prototype carbon storage monitoring, verification, and accounting (MVA) technologies in an operational field environment, it said.

The US Department of Energy’s Fossil Energy Office reported it will make more than $8.5 million in investments in five carbon storage research projects. The commitments reflect FEO’s objective to deploy and validate prototype carbon storage monitoring, verification, and accounting (MVA) technologies in an operational field environment, it said.

Specifically, DOE plans to spend:

• $2,475,424 to help the University of North Dakota Energy & Environmental Research Center at Grand Forks—along with Seismos Inc., CMG Inc., and Denbury Resources Inc.—deploy for validation a new, low-impact method to monitor injected carbon dioxide from the surface at Bell Creek field in southeastern Montana.

• $1,114,398 to assist the Colorado School of Mines at Golden, the US Geological Survey, and the University of Utah’s attempt to advance the integration of geophysical and reservoir simulation tools to monitor CO2 movement and storage permanence at a site in Farnsworth, Tex.

• $2,498,656 to help the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology’s Gulf Coast Carbon Center deploy and validate a novel, ultrahigh-resolution 3D marine seismic technology for carbon storage monitoring, verification, and accounting at the Tomakomai site, a fully developed carbon capture and storage project off the Japanese island of Hokkaido.

• $1,775,434 to support Clemson University and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s project to advance design of optical fiber borehole strain meters, which measure deformation of the Earth, and test the improved designs at a commercial-scale injection site.

• $683,699 to help GPUSA Inc. of Chatsworth, Calif.; Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory; and the Carbon Management Canada Containment and Monitoring Institute seek to validate, in an operational field environment, GPUSA’s powerful low-cost automated borehole seismic source systems.

Contact Nick Snow at [email protected].