Curtis Oldenburg of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory presents a summer lecture titled, “Geologic Carbon Sequestration: Mitigating Climate Change by Injecting CO2 Underground.” He discusses challenges, opportunities, and research needs of this innovative technology.
Climate change provides strong motivation to reduce CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide capture and storage involves the capture, compression, and transport of CO2 to geologically favorable areas, where its injected into porous rock more than one kilometer underground for permanent storage.
Transcript
00:00:01 uh hello everyone and welcome to the second talk of Berkeley lab's uh summer lecture series which is uh brought to you every year by the lab's public affairs Department my name is Dan cotz with the lab's uh Communications Department and today we'll hear from Kurt oldenberg who is the head of the geologic carbon sequestration program in the labs Earth Sciences division uh CO2
00:00:25 capture and storage involves the capture and transport of CO2 to geologically favorable areas where it's injected underground for permanent storage uh Kurt has been working on the latter part of this stage the actual geologic carbon sequestration part for about 10 years now and today he'll discuss the challenges opportunities and research needs of this Innovative technology
00:00:51 which has the potential to help curb global warming um and which needs additional research to guide its implementation uh he received his PhD in geology from UC Santa Barbara in 1989 and has been at brookley lab since 1990 his area of expertise is numerical model development and applications for subsurface flow and transport processes and he works in three main areas of
00:01:20 geologic carbon sequestration uh CO2 injection into depleted gas reservoirs surface leakage processes and risk assessment um Kurt is also a contributing author to a chapter of the intergovernmental panel on climate change's Special Report on co2 capture and storage which shared the 2008 Nobel PRI prize with Al Gore please welcome uh please join me in welcoming
00:01:48 Kurt thanks thanks uh can you hear me okay everybody okay thanks well I'm sure uh every one of you is aware of the problem of CO2 concentrations increasing in the atmosphere due to our use of fossil fuels uh many of you are also probably aware of some of the things that we can do to uh help alleviate this problem such as uh switching fuels using more
00:02:19 natural gas using more Renewables uh certainly uh increasing the way in terms of the efficiency that we use energy I'm going to talk today about another approach a very direct approach uh called geologic carbon sequestration that captures CO2 directly from point sources and injects it into the ground so an overview of this talk looks
00:02:44 like this I'll start out just motivating um come on in everybody there's a lot of seats down in front I'll start by um just sort of summarizing uh this energy climate crisis that we're facing and uh look at our sources of CO2 and our sources of energy um I'll Focus most of the talk on geological carbon sequestration uh that's one element of
00:03:20 carbon capture and storage which I'll explain I'll discuss the processes of capture the processes of storage I'll show you that there are actually examples of this being carried out worldwide today and we'll have sort of an emphasis on the scale that we need to uh carry out this process to make an impact um CCs is known to be expensive I'll discuss what those costs are they
00:03:45 arise both in economic terms as well as in the possibility of some impacts due to the injection itself um I'll talk a little bit about the research that we do here at Lawrence Berkeley lab in this area and close with uh discussion of what's really needed in terms of leadership to describe this process and uh decide whether it is the one we want to choose so the problem can be
00:04:10 Illustrated here in a nutshell through this figure we've got sources of CO2 coming from the combustion of fossil fuels they are emitting a large amount of carbon in the form of CO2 it's more than our terrestrial ecosystems on the continents or the ocean can absorb over the time scale that we're emitting it so it's building up in the atmosphere as it does it causes global warming causes
00:04:38 climate change what I'm going to talk about again are these sources and then this approach of geologic carbon sequestration so let's look first at our energy use this is uh energy consumption uh in the United States and quadrillion BTUs or quads so it happens that we use about a 100 quads in the United States so you can look at these numbers in the boxes here as and the Bubbles as
00:05:07 percentages as well and what you're seeing is that petroleum is about 40 quads natural gas 24 coal 23 these are our fossil fuels these are our primary sources of energy down here in these little uh circles are Renewables and nuclear so we use more than 80% fossil fuel for our energy now there's a lot of information on this figure I just want to point out a few
00:05:35 things first of all the use of fossil fuels second of all we're seeing here where that energy is used so it's used for transportation it's used for electricity generation and it's used for some other sources the tie lines between these show the fractions of the source and the fraction consumed so in other words 70% of our petroleum goes to the transportation sector the transportation
00:06:01 sector relies on petroleum for 96% of its energy so this is a key one it's almost all oil here in transportation but oil is used in some other places as well let's look at coal now 91% of the coal goes to the generation of electricity electric power generation depends on 51% of coal for its its Supply so again what we're seeing here is very a very small contribution from
00:06:28 Renewables a large dependence on coal most of the oil going to Transportation uh a lot of coal going to electric power generation and electric power generation relying on coal so how does this relate to CO2 emissions was shown here are uh Emissions on this axis you can think of these as uh uh gigatons of CO2
00:06:58 um with a few zeros removed so what we're looking at this is annual this would be actually about 2 gigatons of CO2 per year they did this in uh this funny units but think of this as 2 gigatons of CO2 we're looking at the source of CO2 coming from electricity generation and in Coal there by that red color here's the transportation sector again all of those emissions coming from
00:07:25 petroleum and you'll notice that coal and from the power sector and pet and the transportation sector are just about equal we also use a lot of natural gas to generate electricity so that gives the electricity Generation The Edge in terms of the source of uh the production of CO2 emissions but again oil and coal are about equal and what's kind of interesting here is you remember there
00:07:48 was a lot more petroleum used than coal um and uh nearly all of that petroleum went to transportation and yet the emissions here are about the same um I just want to note one more thing and that is that the the sum of all these other things is about equal to each of these so we kind of have onethird other onethird Transportation onethird electricity
00:08:11 generation in terms of our sources of CO2 so why with these so equally matched why are they so equally matched when their sources were somewhat different again 70% of petroleum went to Transportation it has to do with energy content of these fuels so showing here is is just a little table uh for hydrogen we're looking at the energy content 120 K per gram natural gas has a
00:08:39 hydrogen to carbon ratio 4:1 and it's got 51.6 KJ per gram onward to petrolum a 2:1 ratio 43.6 and coal down here with a 1:1 ratio of hydrogen to carbon and it has the lowest energy content so we have to burn a lot of coal to get the same amount of energy that's why these emissions from coal appear to be uh or are higher so what are these Trends over time again I mentioned the ecosystem and
00:09:06 the oceans are not able to take up the emissions that we've been uh producing we're showing here now emissions in gigatons or billion metric tons this is now uh for the uh globally and uh sorry this is uh United States no this is globally we're looking at uh 26 uh gigatons of CO2 per year emitted that's been growing since 1900 rapidly accelerating here at the end and
00:09:37 the corresponding CO2 concentration in the atmosphere showing really this this uptick in the last 50 years or so real acceleration in the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere we're now up to about 385 parts per million by volume you can see that the uh sort of pre-industrial level was probably 300 or thereabouts so we're really in an unprecedented regime here looking at ice core records going back
00:10:04 uh 800,000 years or so we're at the highest CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that we that we've uh ever had so now I'll turn again to emphasize the scale of emissions uh shown on the left here are figures from a very influential paper by picala and Sako where they tried to simplify this system to make it tractable and allow people to come to some uh approaches that we might
00:10:34 uh have for solving it so these are fossil fuel Emissions on this axis these are Global we emit about six to seven uh this is gigatons now of carbon per year we can always convert from carbon to CO2 by multiplying by about four so this is carbon I'm talking about about s gigatons of carbon per year with projections in the future so the baau is a business as usual scenario scario if
00:11:00 we keep growing keep producing power the way we do today our emissions would grow along a curve like this uh the lower curve is just a projection someone made if we were to uh improve efficiency and do fuel switching and if we were able to reduce our emissions and this is in fact the kind of trajectory we'd like to be on in order to mitigate climate change well these curves are kind of
00:11:22 complicated what pakala and sakalo did is said let's just linearize a lot of this so they assumed going forward there would be a linear uh increase if we did business as usual and if we can avoid these emissions so if we can do something to not emit in the future the content essentially of that triangle we could keep our emissions steady where we are
00:11:44 today we could keep our CO2 concentrations lower then they went further and divided this up into seven different wedges they called them or approaches that we could take and again the reason for this is that the magnitude of this problem is very very large we want to divide it up in order so that we can uh Solve IT piece by piece so each of these seven things here
00:12:07 is called a wedge and I'll discuss those a little bit later but this gives you some idea of the magnitude of what we're trying to do say over the next 50 years to reduce our CO2 emissions now let's bring some of these big numbers a lot of gigatons are being talked about here a lot of large numbers let's bring it down down to home here each and every one of us when we burn gasoline in our cars we
00:12:31 produce about 20 lbs of CO2 for every gallon that we use so if you imagine you're driving a a low mileage car here getting 20 m per gallon the amount of carbon we emit is equivalent to approximately one charcoal brickette uh every quarter mile or if you imagine you're driving at 60 m per hour every 15 seconds if you throw a charcoal brickette out the window that's
00:12:57 about the amount of carbon in the CO2 to that you are emitting out the tailpipe so this isn't someone else's problem it's not caused by somebody else we all are part of this we're all producing CO2 so now the global fossil fuel CO2 emissions I've mentioned this number before are about 26 gigatons of CO2 per year and then our us fossil fuel emissions are about six gigatons of CO2
00:13:21 per year so you might keep these numbers in mind again the US is a large fraction of the global uh relative to our population so let's look at gigaton how how big is a gigaton well if we took the city of Berkeley here this image here's Memorial Stadium lbl up here just plotted a a cubic kilometer box here and we imagine that we filled it with water that would
00:13:46 weigh a gigaton so again water in this cubic kilometer would weigh a gigaton the world produces 26 gigatons of CO2 per year uh If This Were CO2 two uh at Reservoir conditions as I'll discuss later uh this box uh would not quite weigh a gigaton but it would almost weigh a gigaton so how big is that well let's think of something else that's a large
00:14:13 number like the population of the of the planet let's assume we can squeeze six people into every cubic meter if we squeezed all of humanity together uh they would actually fit into that cubic kilometer box so we've got a big number of people uh we've got this volume uh and if we could fit six people per cubic meter they would actually all fit in there so it tends to be again a large
00:14:40 amount it's a large volume um if you have any doubt about this fitting of the six people into the cubic meter uh you can see that it that it could be done so it's a big volume it's a big Mass how does it actually scale to some other industrial operations was shown in this table are our point source electricity CO2 emissions in the United States that's 2.4 gigatons of carbon
00:15:09 dioxide per year compared to the amount of water that we inject in the United States for oil and gas operations okay so we produce oil in the US generally from mature oil reservoirs there's a lot of water that gets produced with that oil oil is separated off and used and the water is reinjected well look at that number we currently re-inject 3 gigatons of water per year
00:15:34 so how does that compare uh in terms of the volumes well uh if we use a reservoir pressure uh again that's the place we're going to be putting we think we can put CO2 that is very deep in the ground we'd see that the volume of this 2.4 gigatons is 3.4 G cubic met so that's a a larger volume than for this water uh so this is is not as dense as the water at Reservoir conditions so if
00:16:02 we just look at the ratios of those and normalize to the CO2 we see we currently produ U re-inject about 90% the volume needed uh for the equivalent injection of all of our us electricity CO2 point source emissions so by this measure it looks like it may be a bit more attractable um now there is a detail something that you need to consider here and that is that for the case of uh CO2
00:16:29 injections it'll be displacing existing fluid uh and furthermore that CO2 is slightly re buoyant relative to the existing fluid on the other hand in these uh water reinjections and oil and gas operations it's generally replacement of oil and water that's been produced so there's some sense of a depleted Reservoir and we're just putting something back so we'll keep
00:16:51 that in mind okay so let me turn now to just what carbon capture and storage is now that we've looked at the scales uh carbon capture and storage refers to the capture of CO2 from large stationary sources such as power plants and then the subsequent CO2 storage in the Deep subsurface this is the geologic sequestration part so CCS involves two main processes one is capture and one is
00:17:17 storage uh capture is currently considered to be the the hard part the expensive part of CCS whereas geologic storage is kind of the uncertain one it's the one in which there may be some impacts arising uh there may be some issues of the scale involved but generally we think we understand uh what we need to to to begin this process capture uh to get the cost down is all
00:17:43 discussed may require does require uh a lot more research so in terms of terminology uh you'll hear this called various things carbon capture and storage geologic carbon sequestration geologic CO2 storage Geo sequestration other things in different places around the world regardless of the name it involves these four basic steps that's
00:18:08 the capture from a source the compression of the CO2 so that we can efficiently transport it to the place that it'll be injected and then the injection itself now the main sources for capturing CO2 are flu gases again from combustion of fossil fuels um as well as and as I'll show in a moment the the uh processing of natural gas so there's natural gas in the world methane
00:18:33 that contains a large amount of CO2 too much to sell to the pipeline and uh natural gas operators will strip that natural gas of CO2 sell the methane and in the old days they would just emit that CO2 to the atmosphere but recently there are at least two projects worldwide where that CO2 is being reinjected that's a geologic carbon sequestration process so the first one
00:18:59 I'll talk about is the slier uh project in the North Sea in Norway this is a platform it's offshore they produce natural gas from a gas Reservoir and this has maybe 10 to 133% CO2 in it naturally as the gas is produced CO2 is stripped off gas is sold to the pipeline and the CO2 is reinjected in a shallower brine formation or an aquafer that no one ever expects to drink because of its
00:19:30 quality so CO2 is injected here they've been doing this at a rate of a million tons per year since 1996 so this is an old operation um I've described these processes basically these kinds of operations had an economic incentive for them and so they did it uh furthermore Norway feels a lot of uh uh obligation to deal with CO2 because they are a very large producer of oil
00:19:59 there's another project worldwide that's very similar it's out in the uh Sahara desert in Algeria it's a relatively uh recent um operation that's been developed out there it's called the insala project they also produce a natural gas from a reservoir that's very high in carbon dioxide gas comes to the surface the CO2 is separated out and the CO2 is reinjected only instead of above
00:20:26 the gas Reservoir it's injected into What's called the water leg or the non- gas filled portion of the same Reservoir that contains the natural gas so CO2 is injected here gas is produced from there um this has been going on since 2004 again it's around a million tons per year it's a relatively thin actually low permeability Reservoir they have to use some very long horizontal Wells to get
00:20:54 the injectivity to get the CO2 into that formation and it's a very very nice test bed for some CO2 monitoring Technologies again because we don't have very many cases of uh that we can study this process so shown here is the gas Reservoir outlined by that these two dark lines this is the gas Reservoir it's a doming structure and the CO2 is injected in these blue labeled Wells
00:21:20 that again are in the water leg so the surrounding down dipped region of that doming structure okay okay so where in North America are we going to be uh looking to obtain or capture CO2 this is a map from the Department of Energy's Nat carb project they have a very nice website produce a lot of maps like this where we're looking at is North America with
00:21:46 all of the stationary Point sources of CO2 from which we could perhaps capture CO2 indicated I know these are very small the yellow dots are ethanol plants uh the blue ones are primarily the ones I want to show you are the electricity generation so these blue circles the size of the dot is some indication of the CO2 produced per year uh you can think of a large uh Coal Fired power
00:22:11 plant is producing about 8 million tons of CO2 per year we have over 400 of those in the United States but there's a lot of other sources as you can see here too um sorry you can't probably read this but the red dots here are operations or opportunities similar to the two examples I just showed you of slipher and insala so it's gas processing where there may be a CO2
00:22:36 source that could be captured and injected into the ground all right let's go worldwide now this is from the ipcc report this is a table showing the number of Point sources and their emissions so worldwide we've got about 5,000 Point sources for electricity generation worldwide uh cement production turns out to be a big source of carbon dioxide there's over a
00:23:01 thousand of those many refineries Etc down the list totaling about 8,000 sources in terms of their emissions this is in million tons of CO2 per year now so these sum to about 13 gigatons of CO2 per year globally recall the number I gave you for the total emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels it's 26 gatons so the stationary sources are about half of worldwide CO2 emissions so this
00:23:30 represents an opportunity again it's very difficult to capture CO2 from a car or a truck but it's thought to be much more practical from a point source so about half of global emissions are from point sources so how does capture work well just some points here in terms of uh coal plants pulverized coal are uh plants are burning the coal and air it's heating water making Steam and running a
00:23:56 turbine the CO2 is then exhausted in the flu gas and that's typically at ambient pressure the concentration of CO2 in that flu gas is about 10 to 15% in the atmosphere it's about 0.004% so it's a big concentration but it's still not a highly concentrated stream and the way this is done is uh by using aquous amines and that's Illustrated here we have a a stripping Tower the flu gas
00:24:22 containing the carbon dioxide enters at the bottom and this aming solution enters at the top uh flows down as gas flows up and uh what happens is the amine absorbs carbon dioxide from that gas mixture preferentially the other gases go out the top the uh CO2 Rich solvent then it's it's got absorbed CO2 comes out the bottom and comes up into this Tower which is the uh place where
00:24:53 the the sorbent is regenerated and so now we have Zorb with CO2 in it being trickled down and at the same time it's heated so CO2 comes off of that Zorb and is exhausted out the top to be captured and transported so if this looks a little bit mysterious this part of the process this regeneration of the absorbent is probably something every one of you has
00:25:18 seen when you've taken a cold glass of water before you gone to bed and taking a sip and set it on the night table there and in the morning it's got a bunch of little bubbles in it that happens as it heated overnight and as air exsolved analogous to CO2 exsolving from that absorbent air exsolves and the nucleus is a bubble on your glass so this process is simply repeated with the
00:25:40 regenerated solvent and uh on and on so that's the capture uh process now before I uh get into the uh geologic storage part which is really the focus of this talk I want to describe the properties of CO2 because they're really key to this whole uh idea so this is a sort of a generalized phase diagram we've got temperature on this axis pressure on the vertical axis now so we're increasing
00:26:06 pressure downward analogous to the way that uh depth would increase in the earth going down so what you're seeing here are the different um um phases of carbon dioxide under different pressure and temperature conditions we've got the gaseous regime here the liquid regime and then what's called the super critical regime here and all refers to this word it just refers to a material
00:26:31 being kind of like the liquid and kind of like the gas and not easily distinguished so what we see here for depths greater than a kilometer or so um temperatures are typically more than 40° C at those depths and so we're in What's called the super critical region and the carbon dioxide in this case is a very dense material but it's not very viscous so in that sense it uh is liquid life
00:26:58 but in density and gas-like in viscosity and we call that a super critical liquid super critical fluid um this there's also the phase boundary here between the gas and the liquid but there is no phase boundary out here so these transitions from Super critical to gasas going this way they're super critical the liquid going this way happen without any gross big large change in properties they
00:27:20 happen relatively smoothly so also superimposed here are lines of constant density so you're seeing here 750 kilograms per cubic meter the density of water is a th000 kilograms per cubic meter so that's what I was saying earlier about it being um very uh efficient to store CO2 at depth because in fact its density is quite large but it's not quite as large as water so it
00:27:44 will tend to be buoyant it will tend to rise up okay so with that summary of the properties I can show then what the general targets are for geologic carbon sequestration or geologic CO2 storage this again is a figure from the ipcc report it's a cross-section of the sedimentary uh Basin depth is shown here 1 kilm 2 kilm the first thing to not is that all of the targets except for this
00:28:08 one all of these targets are deeper than 800 meters and remember that's sort of the dividing line between gasius and supercritical CO2 so we want to be injecting deeper than 800 MERS uh the targets here the first one they list is depleted oil and gas reservoirs so that's shown here we have a well it's penetrated a structure that formerly traed trapped natural gas or oil so that
00:28:30 structure has a a record of trapping a buoyant fluid and holding it there for geologic time it's now been produced it's depleted it's available for CO2 injection and storage uh let's go to the uh third option here the Deep sailing formation so these are um uh oers but they're very deep and typically contain salty water that is not drinkable these can be offshore as shown here 3A this is
00:29:01 analogous to the slipher project I showed you CO2 could be injected into this brine formation uh they can also be onshore on the continents again injected into the brine formation and these are considered to have the greatest capacity worldwide so what makes an ideal sort of uh uh reservoir for injecting CO2 we want it to have a a high permeability so that we can inject the CO2 and have it
00:29:28 Flow Away without the pressure building up too high we want it to have a large paracity so there's a lot of space down there for the CO2 and then we want it to have a cap Rock you'll notice these intervening layers here these are the cap rocks these are shaes typically very low permeability formations that are able to to trap the CO2 and not allow it to rise up uh
00:29:51 buoyantly so those are Targets in general now I want to talk in general about trapping mechanisms so I'll show this figure a couple times what it shows is the percent contribution to trapping of four different primary trapping mechanisms so these are structural and stratagraph that's the first primary mechanism second one is residual carbon dioxide trapping third one is solubility
00:30:17 trapping and the fourth one is mineral trapping I'll describe what each one of these things is just note as time goes on after injection the proportion contrib ution to the total trapping of CO2 changes and in particular the the primary structural and strator graphic trapping mechanism diminishes at the expense of these other two so let's go through what these are the first one is
00:30:41 the most simple again structural and stratagraph trapping it's what happens when a buoyant fluid as we've observed with oil and gas Rises through a permeable formation until it can't go any further being trapped by a cap rock or a much less permeable formation so this is sort of the fundamental concept many people have for a buoyant fluid becoming trapped and this can happen
00:31:06 both in a place where oil and gas was trapped as well as in a place where Oil and Gas had not been trapped um we'll talk about that in a moment the second one is this residual CO2 trapping this is the most interesting the most uh compelling trapping mechanism and I'll describe it here this is a a figure just represen in the poor space of a rock so we're down
00:31:29 at a fairly small scale 100 microns this is called a poor throat and a poor body initially let's consider this poor space to be filled with the brine with salty water now we have a boy those colors didn't come out too well there's an interface between CO2 and brine right here and CO2 is being injected by somebody into the system displacing the brine
00:31:59 gosh can anyone see an interface there this is going to be tricky to explain without that um what I can uh tell you is that the brine throughout this explanation is the wedding phase it wants to stick to the Rock and the CO2 is the non-wedding phase so there's a film around the rock here and the CO2 is not penetrating that fil film as the injection continues the
00:32:31 CO2 fills these poor bodies and just necks through barely filling another poor body all the while there's a rim of water the wetting phase around that that uh distribution at this point here where we have CO2 connected throughout we can establish flow through that Pro through that pore space just fine but again there's this light blue rim of water around the edge now if that injection
00:33:01 process stops and the CO2 continues to move Say by a buoyancy force or by some Regional uh gradient allowing CO2 to continue to move the brine now preferentially wants to come back in because remember it's the wedding phase so it gets pulled into these throats and it can just uh continue to embi into that rock and actually uh bypass carbon dioxide
00:33:28 that's in the uh circles so at this point I I'm sorry it doesn't show up better there's a bubble of CO2 here and a bubble of CO2 here and brine is making its way around those bubbles so that at the end we're we're left with a connected path of water as shown by these arrows so brine can flow through the system and the CO2 is actually trapped there so that's the residual CO2
00:33:52 trapping mechanism this happens after injection this happens when CO2 is moving Say by buoyancy by itself and water is coming in at the tail end and due to capillarity it is uh being pulled into the Rock without discharging the CO2 that's already there okay let's look next at the solubility trapping mechanism this one's very straightforward we've all had carbonated
00:34:16 drinks so we know CO2 dissolves into water this is showing as a function of depth the solubility mole fraction of CO2 in the liquid for some various different uh salinity Waters so this is pure water here so we can see that pure water dissolves up to a couple percent of CO2 and a brine a little bit less but still we're talking about percentages of the water that are capable of sorry
00:34:44 percentages of CO2 are capable of dissolving into that water so the solubility trapping mechanism is simply CO2 dissolving into water now one of the neat things about this is that the density of that aquous phase into which CO2 is dissolved is actually larger than without the CO2 so there's a tendency for that brine that has dissolved CO2 in it to move downward and that's
00:35:08 considered a good thing in terms of trapping we're taking the CO2 further away from the atmosphere that water will tend to move downward as well we get a little bit of a volume Advantage because we're always looking for space in this process so that higher density of the mixture is a good thing okay finally mineral trapping again this is a complicated slide I won't go into any
00:35:29 details except to say that we do research on modeling the trapping of CO2 by mineral reactions and this is needed because these reactions tend to be very very slow it's difficult to uh do laboratory experiments on them so this is showing a whole bunch of primary minerals in a rock quartz kite calcite ilite it's subject to CO2 and water and what happens is some of these minerals
00:35:55 dissolve slightly releasing some cat ions and that can produce a secondary carbonate mineral such as magnesite magnesium carbonate or we can produce cerite or we can produce anchorite and doite and what these are again are considered to be the most stable forms of trapping of carbon dioxide the Crux of the issue the problem is this is a very slow process so it takes a long
00:36:20 long time to get this to happen Okay so just summarizing on the uh structures here um the trapping mechanisms we can actually say that we don't need a closed structure for CO2 to be trapped so this is a section of the near Bakers field of the Central Valley and this is a layer here I'm outlining with the pointer uh that's actually been proposed as a carbon sequestration site to inject CO2
00:36:47 into there there's no closed structure and yet it's considered that as that CO2 migrates it will in fact become trapped okay so the overall message here here is that we understand these trapping mechanisms and they're believed to become actually more secure as time goes on okay do we know do we have some examples of this occurring um in fact uh we store natural gas in the United
00:37:11 States to smooth our supply and demand of natural gas so um when it uh say in the summertime and places where we don't have a big air conditioning load natural gas is produced from the reservoirs that are constant rate and we actually store it in over 400 places in the US underground so that in the winter when there's a heating load or sometimes in areas where
00:37:36 we have a high air conditioning load we can produce it back very quickly so natural gas storage is a a proven uh approach and we know that the gas doesn't get lost down there it's in fact trapped and we can produce it back so this is sort of an analog to the CO2 storage concept so looking at the sinks in the United States the these are some sedimentary basins in blue and the oil
00:38:00 and gas fields in Red superimposed so we're looking in the US that these regions as being very amenable to the idea of injecting CO2 and often they uh coincide and uh are very near existing areas of oil and gas operations and that's good because we have a lot of information when we have an oil and gas operation there there are wells and knowledge of the region and knowledge of
00:38:25 the subsurface okay so that leads us to capacity this is now global from the ipcc report oil and gas fields are considered to have something like 675 gigatons of CO2 capacity remember our Global emissions from point sources are about 26 so this is a lot of years of capacity and they could be a whole lot larger and I mentioned earlier the Deep
00:38:49 sailing formations are considered to be have even more capacity and and it's very difficult to estimate but it's considered to be a large large Capac capacity so I promise to get back to the wedges this is a wedge of picala and Sako it's a 50-year offset of emissions equal to 25 gigatons so you start a a process of Technology at zero and you ramp it up to be one gigaton of carbon
00:39:13 per year or about four gigatons of CO2 per year over 50 years so remember our in the United States we're at about 2.4 gigatons of CO2 per year so if we could ramp up over 50 years to sequester all of that that would equal one wedge and again this is a uh for the solving the global problem and it looks like oil and gas reservoirs alone could give us about 150e capacity at a one wedge rate um
00:39:41 however capacity is kind of an area of research it is a function of injectivity and some other issues that we're working on uh some of which I think I can talk about in a moment um which thing that was Global oh sorry I think the when I said us I think I was talking about the US
00:40:03 actually um let's look quickly at costs of CCS for various scenarios um this is a cost curve this is the CO2 captured and stored again in million tons of CO2 per year um this is the cost and what we're looking out are various scenarios I just want to highlight one or two note the first one here is actually a profit making Venture this is where we had an ammonia plant fairly easy to capture CO2
00:40:32 with an enhanced oil recovery opportunity so the CO2 has value because you're enhancing oil recovery this is in fact what has uh spawned an entire industry for more than 30 years injecting CO2 for enhanced oil recovery so that makes money everything else is expensive just very quickly on uh scenario 5 here a large Coal Fired power plant that's not too far away from a
00:40:56 deep sailing formation appears to cost about $50 per ton of CO2 so that would be the total cost for ccs and how does this break down between capture and storage uh that was scenario five I was showing you again I'm sorry about these colors but this right there is that light blue and that's the capture part of that total $50 per ton so most of the cost is in
00:41:25 capture that's why there needs to be more research and capture to try to bring that cost down the injection itself is a relatively small part of the expense or considered as such right now all right let me um kind of trying to move along here um I'm looking now uh we looked at costs in economic terms there are also costs in environment uh environmental terms potentially because
00:41:51 there could be some impacts from this injection so what I've plotted here just qualitatively is the depth at which some impacts would occur and a very qualitative measure of the health safety and environmental impact so right down at the place where we're injecting there might be induced seismicity so that's an impact but it's not considered to be very large because these are tend to be
00:42:14 very small earthquakes now I'll just say that uh what's large and what's considered large are two different things but uh generally you wouldn't expect significant damage from the sort of seismicity that we'll get from these injections then we have displacement of brine um intrusion of the CO2 into hydrocarbon reservoirs that's considered an impact because it would degrade the
00:42:35 hydrocarbons certainly intrusion of CO2 and deportable aquifers or displaced Brine and deportable we're all getting greater and greater impacts here up until at the surface if we were to have leakage of CO2 right to the ground surface that's where we could have a serious health safety and environmental impact CO2 is a dense gas it's accumulation in a Valley could lead to
00:42:59 Suffocation um similarly in basements and homes so these are considered the the greatest hsse impacts they happen shallow um again we don't consider any of this to be likely um things happening down in the reservoir are more uh important for us to look at so I'll look at two examples here that we do research on intrusion into portable aquifers and induc
00:43:22 seismicity this is the issue of groundwater quality so we have CO2 in ction occurring deep we have portable aquifers generally much shallower there is a chance that there could be leakage along a fault or a well that would allow CO2 to enter a portable aquifer the research that's going on is looking at how that slightly more acidic water with CO2 could behave in that formation and
00:43:47 in particular it may dissolve some of the minerals that are present and mobilize some Hazard hazardous constituents in those minerals so degrading that groundwater quality so this is research going on in our division similarly induced seismicity is gaining a whole lot of uh importance recently a lot of attention uh just shown here in general we've got depth
00:44:08 and pressure just some Basics about this the pressure increases with depth as we go down by a hydrostatic pressure profile if we don't exceed that hydrostatic pressure uh we will not inject anything so injections of CO2 or anything occur at some pressure greater than the hydrostatic and anytime we're getting greater than hydrostatic we actually have the potential to induce an
00:44:34 earthquake to cause some sheer failure that's happening because the pore pressure is going up the strength effective strength of the rock is less as the pressure goes up so we can have some seismicity this is a map from uh last week showing earthquakes around the Bay Area the magnitude shown by the size of the uh squares here here we are in Berkeley here are the faults in the Bay
00:44:58 Area shown if you ever look at these in your newspaper you'll always see this cluster up here at the geysers this is a geothermal electricity generating plant the largest in the world they re-inject water to provide U uh heat transfer for that system and they uh have a lot of induced seismicity there they're very small earthquakes but nevertheless the people who live in that area are very
00:45:21 concerned about these earthquakes and they they don't like them happening so that's what I meant by perception and as well as the actual damage that's done okay so our program uh in geologic carbon sequestration and the Earth Sciences division uh our mission is to develop the knowledge and understanding of CO2 injection storage migration processes impacts and monitoring to
00:45:45 inform and guide the safe and effective implementation of geologic carbon sequestration we've been working in the the for about 10 years uh We've published over 85 papers and peerreview journals on the sub subject and been involved in the production of a lot of special issues and other documents our main research activities are leadership and involvement in field demonstrations
00:46:06 that is injections of CO2 both in the US and internationally a lot of work on monitoring this is essential to know where the CO2 is going what the effects are of that injection how can we tell where the CO2 is uh model development and applications for example with the tough codes developed here at Lawrence Berkley lab for all sorts of the interesting processes and and uh
00:46:29 reactions and mechanical effects that go on uh as well the uh risk assessment uh laboratory work in terms of some of the physics of how fluids displace fluids at the core and smaller scales theoretical studies of geochemistry Etc um the lab has some new lab and UC Berkeley have some new energy Frontier research centers focused on CCS I'll talk about those in a minute first of all
00:46:56 summarizing some prior work from our program the friot test was sort of a famous pilot in Texas it was in an old oil field we did simulations of the injection as well as analyses after it was carried out we also uh helped with the monitoring this is a seismic image this is the velocity change of the fluid and rock mixture showing the CO2 that was injected so this is a CO2 plume here
00:47:21 you're seeing in blue and you know this is really an amazing thing to be able to look into an opaque structure like the Earth seismically and to be able to tease out an anomaly that you can correlate with the presence of carbon dioxide and this will be more and more important if we need to account and uh verify geologic carbon sequestration okay another very interesting monitoring
00:47:44 uh project has been looking at uplift at insala we call this is the Algerian gas processing project where natural gas is produced from this area and reinjected in some horizontal wells in this area area what you're seeing here is synthetic aperture radar data collected from a satellite scaled here the blue is 5 mm per year of uplift the red is 5 MIM per year of subsidence so what's seen
00:48:10 here is that the ground surface 2,000 met above the injection Point has deflected upwards at these rates just since 2004 since this injection started it's about a million tons per year into these three Wells collectively so this was quite an interesting uh phenomenon and considered to be very useful again for monitoring where the pressure pulse is and the CO2 injection project all
00:48:37 right very quickly on energy Frontier research centers one was awarded to Barren Smith at L on campus for capture and separations and I think in the interest of time I'm not going to talk about this but uh they are looking at materials membranes um going to use the nanotechnology to try to devel velop materials that are optimized for capture
00:48:59 on the storage side Don depalo at Al uh in our division received another reward for looking at how to control the CO2 processes so these include the carbonate mineralization this is the mineral trapping mechanism I talked about uh the transport of fluids at very small scale and then emergent processes what might arise from sort of the combination of processes as CO2 is injected and occurs
00:49:28 uh processes occurring over many scales all right so I want to finish up now just to talk about uh research needs we we need to uh do site characterization to understand the capacity where CO2 can be stored most effectively monitoring verification and accounting this word accounting comes up because in a CA trade system or with a carbon tax there's going to be a desire to actually
00:49:56 um hold the operator to knowing where that CO2 is again if money's Changing Hands they've got to prove that they have the CO2 and it's in the ground and not getting out into the atmosphere risk and impact assessment is ongoing work the performance of these systems optimizing these systems we want to make sure we're um injecting the CO2 and it's filling the pores as efficiently as
00:50:19 possible um unexpected consequences are that things were're missing things that could happen that we're not anticipating if they do happen something we don't like how can we mitigate it what sorts of uh corrective actions can be taken so in general we go by this sort of flow here where we find that the demonstrations and the field deployments provide us with a lot of information
00:50:43 that feeds fundamental knowledge that then feeds back into the demonstrations so we like to keep the circle going and keep very involved in both areas the research that we're doing is to accelerate the safe and effective implementation one could go out today and do much of this but we feel the research is needed to really make sure it's safe and effective so the message
00:51:07 there is that uh we should probably really get started with doing these things and Learn by doing there's nothing that's so irreversible so to conclude we have large Point sources in which CO2 can be captured uh we have geologic formations in which CO2 can be stored the processes and mechanisms are understood the capacity seems to exist for hundreds of
00:51:31 years of injection the capture is expensive there's nothing free about CCS um in addition to being expensive there may be impacts from uh injecting but we think they'll be very limited and well chosen sites pressure management may become necessary as pressures go up the CO2 is injected and the DU seismicity is a concern we may have to produce back water to maintain the
00:51:54 pressure um overall it looks like CCs is a sort of direct and effective way of reducing CO2 emissions so you might ask why aren't we employing employing this approach now well there's a lot of other issues regulations only in the last year or so have we actually been in the United States developing regulations that would even allow this to occur and
00:52:20 these have not been finalized there's a lot of issues around liability and legal aspects who carbon dioxide is it if it does cause some problem whose is it is it the one who injected it or the one the power plant that it came from the legal aspects extend to poor space ownership we have mineral rights in the United States and we have property rights it's never been decided that
00:52:42 someone owns the space within the pores so the state of Wyoming has actually solved this and they decided the poor space ownership goes with the property rights ownership and so they're pushing that as as being a reasonable approach but nationally it has not been decided public acceptance many people will be skeptical of something like this um finally the big one actually probably
00:53:05 the biggest there is there's no economic incentive I've told you how expensive it is uh who's going to pay for this well what's um desired is some sort of price on carbon so that there's a cost to emitting it and what's in the CL climate and energy bill that's made it through the House of Representative that's sitting in the Senate I don't quite follow it daily um but what's in there
00:53:28 is what's called a cap and trade sort of approach and that is a cap on emissions is placed and then allowances to emit are traded so they have value um companies will um be able to uh justify basically the expense of doing carbon sequestration because if they don't well actually they cannot emit that otherwise so the cap and trade sort of approach is one to give to create an economic
00:53:55 incentive for CO2 injection so to make all of this happen to get over these other issues there's really a need for some strong leadership I'd say both in the US and globally um there are high costs to carrying out CCS these need to be explained to people and um discussed and if they can be reduced that's great but we really have to compare in the end
00:54:21 those high costs to the cost of doing nothing and I guess just a final um word on the costs is that when we started doing this work these hundreds of billions of dollars and things like that seemed like big numbers and with the recent uh downturn in the economy with the stimulus Bill and things like that we're getting more used to these big numbers so it may be easier to uh allow
00:54:44 this to happen okay I'll be happy to answer questions thanks we have a time for a few questions please raise your hand and uh wait for the microphone $50 a ton is equal to how many cents per kilowatt hour say that again $50 a ton is equal to how many cents per kilowatt hour I'm I'm going to just have to generalize because I don't
00:55:12 know the number exactly but we're talking about probably a 40 to 50% energy penalty so if you're 12 cents per kilowatt hour call it 18 cents per kilowatt hour we we often couch this cost in terms of a energy penalty and uh it's a significant energy penalty some people think it can be reduced but that's sort of a a safe
00:55:37 number to give you what sort of leaking uh data do you have from the existing uh the existing projects and could you give us a more complete list of existing projects we only saw you only you only listed one yeah the um of large scale Industrial projects uh those natural gas processing projects are it there are pilot projects that are you know large but not as large
00:56:04 as those um I'd say that there is no um data on any leakage from any of them because none it's been observed um where we can look at leakage is at natural analoges um at uh actually man-made analoges as well the natural gas storage industry and there have been some cases of some um things happening around faults at uh
00:56:33 at least one natural gas storage project but again it was mitigated you know observed and pressures were lowered and it was mitigated so leakage especially to the surface is not considered a a serious issue um the primary risk factor for it is considered to be man-made Wells so the wells that exist in an area um may be plugged but the CO2 may actually react um with well cement CO2
00:57:04 and water and create a a pathway so Wells are considered one of the big uh hazards um the natural system seems very capable of containing the CO2 if it's injected deep enough under a cap rock is the uh CO2 being injected as a liquid due to the immense pressure um it's kind of a two-part question is it being injected asid I would call it a supercritical fluid okay
00:57:31 it may be in the pipeline formally as a liquid but as soon as it's heating up above 31° C which is not all that warm it's super critical okay and then due to that Is it feasible to uh inject CO2 into like deeper Oceanic regions because of the density it would just stay at the bottom is a liquid yeah that was an approach people were uh talking about several years a ago and still do in some
00:57:56 circles but in terms of uh the CO2 staying ponded at depth it seems that the it doesn't stay there very long there may be ocean currents that allow it to mix now more interesting is a an offshore geologic option which is to put it um kind of shallow beneath deep sea sediments so you have the benefits of high density as well as the geological formation much shallower than what I've
00:58:21 talked about but nevertheless some geological formation separating the sea to from the ocean so that approach is is actually kind of promising and there's a pilot proposed for the east coast of the US that will'll try to exploit that thank you yeah uh so CO2 storage capacity underground it's like um it's a large
00:58:44 number but are we are we talking about how much and how long could it be a solution are we talking about 100 years a billion years hundreds of years is what what we think for the capacity and then the CO2 that we put there will stay there much much longer than a 100 years that's just the capacity that we have for the rate at which we produce it
00:59:12 today a question over here um much as we uh the federal government may need to subsidize transmission lines for wind energy to get to the source or demand of the energy uh that incentive from the federal Ser government uh would you give me a balance between geologic use within or near a cold fire plant versus the options of pumping uh CO2 to the major reservoirs like off the coast of
00:59:43 California and that maybe the FED feds would want to incentivize a major pumping line and therefore take care of the liability as a federal uh government rather than put that liability on individual plants or uh so what's the trade-off for geologic storage beneath the plants and our R&D knowledge versus transmission to large basins and having Federal subsidies yeah an interesting
01:00:13 question uh a little more on the policy side than I'm used to but um I would just comment that uh there' probably be um a lot of attractiveness to that that is having some sort of of uh Federal adoption of both the liability as well as the cost for creating the transmission facility now um it seems like in the past existing uh power plants were not cited based on geologic
01:00:40 storage capacity certainly so there would be the need for that transmission regardless um an analogy you might uh know about is the current CO2 pipelines that take carbon dioxide from natural reservoirs to Texas for enhanced oil recovery so there are long pipelines already I believe they were not subsidized at all you know run and operated by private companies so either
01:01:05 way but I could see definitely that anything that alleviates the cost to the providers of this would be something attractive to them and we have time for one one final question um is there any research Avenues or anything going on that involves both storage and fixation or maybe not fixation is the wrong word but I know
01:01:29 there's something going on with with uh exchanging methane hydrates for carbon carbon dioxide hydrates is that can they and can they work at the same time is that even a viable what the question is uh has to do with methane hydrates and the potential substitution of CO2 for methane in a hydrate type structure so there is some research going on with that um it's uh I'd say a more um you
01:01:58 know sort of higher order next thing to be done but again in this field we're always looking for the economic incentive and so it may be that that could arise as being something attractive because there is the production of methane again and it being a clean fuel relative to the other ones we use you can done synonymously like at the same time yeah so the question is
01:02:19 can they be done uh simultaneously and I'd say that's the way it it should be done yeah um I skipped over the co bed methane uh option but that's similar to hydrates where we have methane that's locked up in coal and CO2 will absorb preferentially onto coal releasing that methane and that's called enhanced coal bed methane so a very analogous
01:02:40 procedure would be what you're talking about a lot of details in there concerning methane hydrates as you might imagine just producing the gas at all so thanks again to Kurt for this interesting talk it'll be uh really interesting to watch as this research progresses and join us next week for uh the next talk on cosmology on gravitational
01:03:04 lensing
