Project Summary
Australian saline formations have the capacity to store all of the country’s CO2, provided uncertainties are addressed.
The CO2CRC Otway Stage 2C Project aims to inject up to 15,000 tonnes of CO2 into a saline formation to demonstrate important aspects relevant to large-scale geological storage of CO2 in saline formations; as proposed by Australian CCS Flagships and other large-scale CCS projects around the world. The project involves the installation of the permanent seismic array in the summer of 2014/15, the completion of injection by mid 2016 and the conduction of post-injection annual seismic surveys to monitor the plume to 2018.
The Otway Stage 2C project had three scientific objectives:
- Detect injected CO2 (Buttress gas) in the subsurface and ascertain minimum seismic detection limits.
- Observe the gas plume development using time-lapse seismic.
- Verify stabilisation of the plume in the saline formation using time lapse seismic.
Progress to date has provided the required infrastructure for acquisition of the baseline data and for further monitoring and observation of the CO2 injection. This included:
- Deployment of buried seismic geophones along 11 receiver lines. Length of the receiver lines tp 1460m, spacing 100m, and 15m between the receivers
- Deployment of two types of Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) fibre optic cables along the same 11 receiver lines
- Installing powered seismic recording facility in a dedicated container (Seismic Lab) in the vicinity of CRC-2 wellhead, to house the seismic and iDAS recording equipment.
More recently, the CO2 injection phase and the first seismic survey were completed.
- The baseline survey was acquired in March 2015 followed by three monitor surveys in January, February , March and April 2016 after injection of 5, 10 and 15 kt of CO2, respectively. Time lapse difference images show a clear anomaly localised around the injection well. The anomaly is initially approximately circular in shape, and as the injection progresses, the plume reaches a known sealing fault to the south of the injector and then spreads up-dip along the fault
For more information on the Otway Project please visit the CO2CRC website:
