Recent Developments in Modeling: Farnsworth Texas, CO 2 EOR Carbon Sequestration Project

The Southwest Partnership on Carbon Sequestration (SWP), one of seven large scale CO2 sequestration projects sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, is currently conducting its Phase III study, and has completed its injection period with storage of nearly 800,000 tonnes of CO2 at an active commercial-scale carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) project. All CO2 stored during the injection period is anthropogenic, sourced from a fertilizer and an ethanol plant, and would have otherwise entered the atmosphere. Primary goals of this project are to: (1) assure that injected CO2 remains permanently trapped in the subsurface; (2) quantify storage capacity; and (3) to determine operational factors that optimize CO2 storage in depleted reservoirs. This project has demonstrated all aspects of a commercial CCUS field operation, including reservoir engineering, monitoring, simulation, and risk. The project has successfully optimized the Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) to CO2 storage balance, used direct monitoring for leakage, and 4D seismic to observe both the distribution and phase of CO2 in the storage formation. In addition, the project has contributed to best practices manuals for associated carbon storage. During each year of the project an updated fine-scale geologic model is produced and distributed for simulation analyses necessary for effective risk assessment and for increased resolution of monitoring, verification and accounting tasks. The SWP researchers continually refine the FWU geological model with new data and analytical techniques wherever possible. The data incorporated includes well logs, reprocessed 3D seismic, fault, fracture features, updated hydraulic flow units, and information gleaned from the microsiesmic analysis. Available geological, geophysical, and geomechanical data are integrated to generate a new static geomodel based on the reprocessed 3D surface seismic data. This paper provides an overview of the recent updates to the FWU geological model.