Data to Cover Storage Site Characterization, Risk Assessment, Monitoring Operations
Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
04/27/12
One of the project managers in charge of operations at the IEA-GHG Weyburn-Midale CO2 monitoring and storage project in southern Saskatchewan is set to present best practices gleaned from more than a decade of monitoring onsite enhanced oil recovery operations at the Eleventh Annual Carbon Capture, Utilization and Sequestration Conference next week in Pittsburgh. Neil Wildgust, Weyburn project manager for the Petroleum Technology Research Center, the group that managed monitoring operations onsite, will present an overview of best practices for several technical themes, including site characterization, geochemical and geophysical monitoring, well integrity and risk assessment, among others, ahead of releasing a final best practices report later this fall.
International monitoring at Weyburn-Midale has been ongoing since 2000, making the research efforts one of the first and longest-running related to CO2 storage in the world. During that time period, the PTRC monitored the more than 18 million tons of CO2 injection at Cenovus Energy’s Weyburn oil field and Apache Canada’s neighboring oil field for enhanced oil recovery operations. Wildgust said the in particular the best practices guide will emphasize the need for baseline data on the site before injection begins in order to act as a reference point for future data. “One of the things we’ve certainly established for the monitoring both geophysical and geochemical is how important it is to have baseline data, and that’s something I think … our experience has really emphasized,” he told GHG. “It’s particularly important, I think, for environmental assets that surround the storage reservoir to make sure that you have got them thoroughly characterized and understood and you’ve got that baseline information available for what conditions were like before you started your project.”
‘Reference Guide’ for Future Projects
Wildgust said the goal of the guide is to compile knowledge gleaned from the PTRC’s more than 10 years of monitoring experience that could help developers interested in operating their own CO2 storage projects. “The idea of that really is to look at all the scientific research that’s been carried out on the Weyburn project over the last decade and really try to draw out some of the main lessons learned that could be applied to other CO2 storage sites particularly with regard to monitoring and verification,” Wildgust said. “We want it to be a reference guide for other projects and parties with an interest in CO2 storage in the future.”
While the best practices manual itself has not been fully written, Wildgust said that it will be less about specific details from the Weyburn-Midale sites and more about lessons that are broadly applicable to any CO2 sequestration site. “We really wanted to make this best practices manual widely applicable and a reference document rather than a report on Weyburn—we’ve got other things for what we’re going to be doing to report on the project itself. So this is just one of several deliverables for this project,” he said. Wilgust said that their best practices could be particularly helpful given that Co2 utilization via EOR is now being emphasized heavily in the field. “For that reason alone it’s a very important site,” he said.
The best practices report is largely the last remaining Weyburn-Midale-related work the PTRC has left in its contracts with Cenovus and Apache. In the meantime, much of the staff has switched to focusing on PTRC’s new Aquistore project, a CCS monitoring venture in southwest Saskatchewan that seeks to store up to 1 million tons of captured CO2 into saline brine formations. Earlier this spring, the project received $19 million in federal and provincial government funding. Meanwhile, both Cenovus and Apache will continue their own in-house CO2 plume monitoring efforts and Weyburn and Midale.
