Session 17. Oral Presentation for: Saline aquifer CO2 storage modelling – harder than it sounds

Presented on 28 May 2025: Session 17 The development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities has been increasing rapidly in recent years, with hydrocarbon reservoirs and deep saline aquifers being the primary targets for CO2 storage. Saline aquifers typically offer larger storage resources and a low number of penetrations through their caprocks. As such, despite the historical lack of data acquisition relative to depleted reservoirs, CCS project developers remain interested in saline aquifer CO2 storage. This paper shares some challenges faced when modelling CO2 storage in saline aquifers, and the lessons learned from tackling these challenges. First, the paper highlights the outsized impact that the connectivity to a regional aquifer (relative to other sensitivities such as residual CO2 saturation, brine salinity, etc.) has on storable quantities. Specifically, subject to a maximum allowable storage pressure, a storage site needs to be connected to a regional aquifer several orders of magnitude larger than the storage site itself to have sufficient pressure space to store commercial quantities of CO2. Next, the paper discusses the computational cost of reservoir simulation for saline aquifers. Saline aquifer storage sites may extend to tens of kilometres in scale, so models need to be simplified to keep them computationally tractable while preserving the consistency of the simulated results. In this regard, various numerical approaches that simplify the physics simulated are shared, which can be considered by the reader for their own simulation models. To access the Oral Presentation click the link below. To read the full paper click here