DOE monitors CO2 injection in Australian gas field

April 28, 2008
The US Department of Energy provided technology that helped Australia launch the Otway basin pilot project, which will inject carbon dioxide into a depleted gas field in southeastern Australia.

The US Department of Energy provided technology that helped Australia launch the Otway basin pilot project, which will inject carbon dioxide into a depleted gas field in southeastern Australia.

The project involves monitoring the CO2 to demonstrate the feasibility of storing it in the Waarre formation.

The Otway basin pilot project is one of 19 sequestration projects endorsed by the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), an international climate change initiative that focuses on sequestration technology development.

The project is directed by Australia’s Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC) of Canberra. Project partners include DOE and various public and private organizations.

Up to 100,000 tonnes of CO2 will be injected more than a mile beneath the earth’s surface. A team of Australian, American, and other international researchers will monitor the storage reservoir.

CO2CRC is 100% owner of licenses PPL11 and PPL13, which cover Buttress CO2 field and nearby depleted Naylor natural gas field.

The program will involve production of CO2 from Buttress at a rate of 3 MMcfd, piping the gas 1.75 km to Naylor, and injecting it into the Cretaceous Waarre reservoir on the flank of the depleted field (OGJ, Mar. 10, 2006, Newsletter).

The injection process will span 1-2 years, while monitoring and modeling activities will last for several years beyond that.

Buttress reserves exceed 10 bcf, 90% of which is CO2. Minor amounts of methane will be stripped out and used to power the compressors and other equipment. The Otway project is unusual in that researchers own the petroleum leases, the CO2 source, and the depleted storage reservoir.

DOE provides expertise

In DOE-sponsored research, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) developed instrumentation to track the CO2 plume during and after the injection. Sophisticated seismic techniques will provide data about the location, migration, and permanent storage of the CO2 plume.

Remote sensing is just one of several monitoring techniques LBNL researchers will deploy. Another technique is a unique formation well-sampling method that taps the reservoir and delivers fluid samples to the surface for determination of CO2 content and other geochemical analyses.

Using geophysical, geochemical, and other reservoir data acquired during storage operations, the researchers also will be able to refine models to significantly increase the predictability of formations to permanently store CO2.