|
The Geologic CO2 Storage (GCS) Joint Industry Project at the Center for Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering is now in its fourth year of investigating the key physical processes associated with sequestering anthropogenic carbon dioxide. Injecting carbon dioxide into formations deep within the Earth's crust is one of the few technologies that can be implemented rapidly enough and at a large enough scale to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. But this requires society – industry, government, consumers – to make a tremendous investment of resources, both financial and human. This challenge motivates the current goals of Dr. Steven Bryant's project: to train a new breed of "carbon management engineers" to design, construct, operate, optimize, and regulate large-scale carbon dioxide sequestration projects, and to carry out research that makes this technology as cost-effective and routine as possible.
|
|
|
Photo at left: Dr. Steven Bryant, associate professor of petroleum and geosystems engineering, holds two halves of a fractured sample of wellbore cement. Confining the two halves together at pressures similar to those in formations deep below the Earth's surface provides a laboratory model of one type of pathway conceivably allowing carbon dioxide to escape the storage formation. Bryant's group is running experiments and developing computational models to evaluate the flow rate through these pathways when the flowing fluid – carbon dioxide or water with carbon dioxide dissolved in it -- reacts with the cement. The reactions can change the mechanical properties of the cement -- possibly enough for the confining pressure to squeeze the pathway shut, preventing further leakage. |
|
|
Photo at left: Dr. Steven Bryant and graduate research assistant Nicolas Huerta, who was recently awarded a National Energy Technology Laboratory internship, discuss Huerta's measurements of the flow properties of several fractured cement samples as the confining pressure was altered. Huerta will use his internship to enhance his geomechanical modeling of the CO2/brine/cement system. |
