Pressure control and conformance management for safe and efficient CO₂ storage - accelerating CCS technologies

Pre-ACT is a €5.2M project led by the Norwegian research institute Sintef. The objective of Pre-ACT is to equip operators and regulators of carbon capture and storage with decision support protocols that enable them to establish safe and efficient monitoring systems and to quantitatively assess storage conformance.

PML’s role in the project is to quantify the environmental consequences, if any, of discarding hypersaline brines produced from geological saline aquifers at sea. Such a practice would enable the pressure in the aquifers to be maintained within safe limits whilst carbon dioxide is injected into the aquifer pore space. We are using a modelling approach utilising a high resolution implementation of the FVCOM model to investigate multiple scenarios of brine disposal. An outcome of this work will be a recommendation of best practice for brine disposal including a monitoring protocol, if necessary.

The ACT Pre-ACT project has received funding from RCN (Norway), Gassnova (Norway), BEIS (UK), RVO (Netherlands), and BMWi (Germany) and is co-funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme, ACT Grant Agreement No 691712. In addition, we acknowledge the following industry partners for their contributions: Total, Statoil, Shell, TAQA.