NAPE: CCUS is a Risky Venture Hinging on Tech, Regulation, Reservoirs

The question of commerciality aside, projects in the carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) space pose risks that proper reservoir assessment and collaboration can help mitigate.

Regulatory certainty is one piece of the puzzle, as is a solid understanding of the reservoir and enabling technologies, which experts said can be achieved through a transdisciplinary approach.

Discussing CCUS risk mitigation during NAPE’s Energy Business Conference on Feb. 7, panelists said all of those factors must come together in a scalable fashion for the world to capture and sequester the volume of carbon necessary to meet emissions reduction goals.

Panelists said risks can be mitigated through proper reservoir assessment and collaboration.

Knowledge and skills

“When we talk about risk, it’s also important to acknowledge that we can mitigate that risk,” Katja Akentieva, vice president for new energy solutions, Western Hemisphere, at TGS, said.

She said that while the industry tries to figure out how to make money from CCUS projects, it is also still in the early stages of assessing three main risks pertaining to capture, transportation and storage.

The knowledge needed to do that is similar to expertise already available in the oil and gas industry. 

Even so, such knowledge will need to be specialized depending on the project.

“We certainly need to be multidisciplinary, but also we need more of that knowledge because we need to scale this business in a meaningful manner to really help to decarbonize,” she said.

Transdisciplinary technology research involves academia working “closely with other stakeholders like the private sector, like state agencies, the federal government, the citizens, in order to solve some really urgent societal challenges,” Camelia Knapp, geophysics professor in the Boone Pickens School of Geology at Oklahoma State University, said.

But CCUS’ challenges go beyond tying together the knowledge of geologists, engineers and other technical disciplines.

The public needs to understand what CO₂ injection means, said Autumn Haagsma, director for the Michigan Repository for Research and Education and assistant director for the Michigan Geological Survey at Western Michigan University.

“It’s equally important to have people that understand community engagement and outreach strategies and how to connect with your stakeholders and make impactful relationships to help a project be long-term and sustainable,” she said. 

Knapp said the public may have concerns about carbon injection that are similar to concerns about produced water injection.

“I think the public perception there is that if there are induced earthquakes from injecting produced water in the ground, it’s going to be the same with injecting CO₂,” she said. “For this technology to be accepted by the public, you really need to show that you’ve done everything possible and you have everything in place to monitor it long term.”

Knapp noted that if onshore reservoirs are not prospective, offshore reservoirs may be, and typically the mineral rights owners offshore are state or federal stakeholders, she said. 

Akentieva noted the complexities associated with offshore projects are different than those for onshore CCUS projects.

“Offshore projects do tend to be a little bit more complex compared to onshore,” she said. “If I’m in the offshore environment, where am I piping, and how am I transporting my CO₂ to my storage site?”

Understanding geology, using data

Critical to the success of CCUS projects is an understanding of the rock at both the macro and nano scales, Knapp said.

“I would say you can’t ever know your geology well enough,” Knapp said.

Haagsma added that understanding the variability within a reservoir is important as properties in a reservoir can change in a short space. And because different reservoirs have different strengths, she said, each project could be a trade-off on how much carbon needs to be stored based on the type of reservoir available.

Haagsma said understanding the history of the subsurface can suggest what will be active and prospective in the future. 

“There could be competition for subsurface use,” such as a waste disposal operation, she said, “and the chemistry of that stuff can be kind of gnarly” depending on how various contents of the reservoir might interact with CO₂.

Akentieva said repurposing existing seismic data can help with understanding a reservoir’s capacity for storage. Seismic acquisition technologies, she said, are “always suitable for monitoring CO₂ storage.”

Activity reset

Akentieva said economic triggers increased CCUS project planning and technology R&D. 

“When you develop something new, something innovative … there are many technologies that still need to be developed,” she said.

Subsidies are one factor, she said, noting it took government support to get solar technology to a point where it could be commercially viable.

The same applies to CCUS.

“To really get this going at scale, then it needs to be economic, it needs to be economically viable for the companies … for everyone in this game to see that they can contribute, but they can also benefit,” Akentieva said. 

Benefits under Section 45Q were extended through the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 and again with the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, and that has also triggered momentum, she said.

“For companies like TGS for example, we know it’s a market with a big growth component. So what can we do to transition some of our capabilities to help enable academia to do further research? For us, it’s easy. We provide some of our data, data that is helping to de-risk the subsurface,” she said.

While the incentives need to remain in place to support the growth of the CCUS industry and decarbonization efforts, she said the goal should be to focus on building the needed technologies that will make CCUS sustainable without government incentives.

Knapp said the world’s “great deal of urgency” to decarbonize is driving much of the activity.

Current levels of sequestration — about 40 million tons a year of CO₂ — fall far short of the billions of tons that need to be stored, she said.

Scaling the technology “is the only way we can make a meaningful contribution to our ability to decarbonize,” she said.

Akentieva said the industry is ready to scale up. 

“It’s got great knowledge, it’s got a great potential to store, it’s got a great rock. It’s conducive to storing. Now we need to accelerate, and that acceleration will come from technologies, but it will come from the skills that will either be transferred from oil and gas or skills that will need to be developed,” she said.