CO2 geological storage risks management
Abstract
The development of CO2 geological storage at large scale is dependent on the management of potential risks for each specific storage site. Risks management is mainly made of risks identification, assessment, treatment and monitoring. Demonstrating the safety of a specific storage site is challenging for several reasons. Stochastic and epistemic uncertainties in terms of subsurface parameters, the time-scale over which risks have to be managed (long term, unusual compared to other industrial activities), the complex and coupled mechanisms implied by the injection of supercritical CO2 in the subsurface (thermal, hydrogeological, mechanical, geochemical) are some of them. For several years, BRGM has developed, in various projects, an expertise in terms of CO2 risks management, including the elaboration of a methodological framework and of specific tools to understand and control several types of risks. This comprises the development of specific skills in risk identification on a specific storage site (development of generic bow-tie diagrams and workshop organization on specific site), in risk quantification including modeling of different kinds of risks (analytical and numerical models of the risks scenario up to the potential impacts, with coupling, as well as uncertainty representation and propagation), in mitigation and remediation technologies in case of undesired behavior (database development notably), and in the development of innovative monitoring tools. The proposed framework as well as the different developed tools will be presented.