Geology in a Green Energy Future | CAS Inquire

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03/01/2024 Added

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Cara Burberry, geology (Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences) gave the CAS Inquire lecture on Feb. 27.

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[00:00:01.320]All right. Good evening, everyone.
[00:00:03.360]Thank you so much for being here.
[00:00:04.720]Whether you're joining us here in person or online through Zoom.
[00:00:09.480]Welcome to the fifth presentation
[00:00:12.200]as part of our CAS Inquire lecture series.
[00:00:15.240]As many of you know, our organizing theme this year has been
[00:00:19.480]and continues to be sustainable futures.
[00:00:23.040]And in keeping with the culture and the identity of our college
[00:00:28.520]and which is nicely embodied within this lecture series.
[00:00:32.160]This year's theme is being explored through a diverse range
[00:00:35.760]of intellectual orientations and disciplinary perspectives,
[00:00:40.040]which has included up until this evening geography,
[00:00:43.440]philosophy, modern languages, and literatures, and physics.
[00:00:47.880]And tonight, we're excited to turn to insights from the field of geology
[00:00:52.000]and the potential role of carbon dioxide storage in a more sustainable future.
[00:00:58.760]And so this evening, we're
[00:00:59.800]really thrilled to have the presentation tonight from Dr.
[00:01:03.720]Cara Burberry and a presentation entitled Geology in a Green Energy Future.
[00:01:10.080]Dr. Burberry is an associate professor of geology
[00:01:13.600]in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
[00:01:16.720]She received her Ph.D.
[00:01:18.200]from Imperial College London and worked at the University of Utah
[00:01:21.680]before joining the College of Arts and Sciences in 2010.
[00:01:26.160]Her research group investigates the deformation of full thrust belts
[00:01:31.080]and the associated for land basins, using an integrated approach that combines
[00:01:36.720]remote sensing, analog modeling, field
[00:01:39.960]campaigns and seismic interpretation.
[00:01:43.680]She's and this is the great thing about geologists.
[00:01:45.600]They get to work in all kinds of exciting places around the world.
[00:01:48.080]So thank you very much for joining us.
[00:01:49.160]Please join me in welcoming Dr. Burberry.
[00:01:51.600]Thank you for the introduction.
[00:01:54.000]I'm delighted to talk to you today a little bit about some of the work
[00:01:56.640]that some of my research group has been doing about carbon dioxide sequestration.
[00:02:01.280]And this is just one of our tools in a toolkit
[00:02:04.400]in terms of attacking some of our problems with carbon dioxide
[00:02:09.760]and with transitioning to what we consider a green energy future.
[00:02:15.080]Before I start, I'd like to thank some of my collaborators
[00:02:18.000]here at UNL, some Slagle and Latif Louella, students
[00:02:22.000]who have worked in the research groups since he came over in
[00:02:26.040]engineering is a very precious collaborator,
[00:02:29.920]as are Jessie Carus and Joe Cole over in the School of Natural Resources.
[00:02:35.400]So this is a collaborate ation that spans the whole of the university.
[00:02:40.040]A lot of the work that you'll see today was funded by the Nebraska
[00:02:43.200]Environmental Trust and also by the Nebraska Public Power District.
[00:02:47.800]And lastly,
[00:02:48.520]I need to thank places that have given us samples to work on the USGS core
[00:02:53.040]research facility in Denver, Colorado, and the Conservation and Survey Division
[00:02:58.400]core repository at UNL, specifically Michelle Vasquez for Core Access.
[00:03:03.600]Michelle is the person to whom one has to go and beg.
[00:03:06.880]Is one gets to get cores from the Conservation Survey Division,
[00:03:10.320]which is where we get a lot of calls that has been drilled
[00:03:13.600]and stored in Nebraska.
[00:03:16.800]So this is where we're going to go today.
[00:03:18.760]We'll talk a little bit about background and what the energy transition really is.
[00:03:22.520]And then I'm going to try and illustrate what I'm talking about
[00:03:25.280]by looking at three different case studies from around the world
[00:03:28.600]at different stages of carbon dioxide storage.
[00:03:31.640]We'll talk a little bit about some of the work that we did in western Nebraska.
[00:03:35.400]We'll talk about the Kaiser in Illinois, which is a little bit further on.
[00:03:39.200]That's one of the bigger projects in the U.S.
[00:03:41.640]And then we'll talk about Sleipner in
[00:03:43.240]Norway, which was probably which is arguably one of the most mature
[00:03:47.280]carbon dioxide storage port storage projects in the world.
[00:03:51.800]And then we'll look perhaps for a little bit
[00:03:55.040]with a few projections and some hope for the future.
[00:03:57.560]And Angela, I will leave time for questions
[00:03:59.520]and I will not talk too much, but I do not promise you anything.
[00:04:03.400]So what
[00:04:04.120]exactly is the energy transition here?
[00:04:08.280]S&P Global.
[00:04:09.480]The key points are one a shift
[00:04:12.960]from fossil fuel based system use of energy,
[00:04:17.040]which includes coal, oil and natural gas
[00:04:20.600]to renewable energy sources like wind,
[00:04:23.960]solar, lithium ion batteries.
[00:04:27.000]Now, that also can include geothermal, it can include hydrogen.
[00:04:32.280]Hydrogen is something that's really becoming an incredibly hot topic.
[00:04:36.040]And I can talk a little bit about that towards the end if you would like me to.
[00:04:39.920]But one of the things that we also have to do is we
[00:04:43.360]have to think about trying to clean up some of these fossil
[00:04:48.160]based systems in the process of making this shift,
[00:04:53.560]because it is not possible to be able to shift just like that.
[00:04:58.400]We would love to be able to turn on a dime and be able to shift from A to B.
[00:05:03.440]We would love to be able to make that kind of transition
[00:05:06.360]very, very quickly, but it's just not physically possible.
[00:05:10.320]Some people have estimated that the scale up of the infrastructure
[00:05:13.760]would need to shift from A to B
[00:05:16.280]and to even to do the carbon sequestration that we need to do
[00:05:20.040]would require a scale up of infrastructure on the scale of this, of the
[00:05:26.280]scaling up of
[00:05:27.240]in well in the world wars, the scaling up of the weapon
[00:05:31.200]creation and infrastructure creation during the world wars.
[00:05:35.040]So that kind of gives you the scale of what we actually need to be able to do.
[00:05:39.800]So it's driven by also sounds easy.
[00:05:42.440]It sounds really easy. It's a great principle.
[00:05:44.640]It's driven by both climate and economic considerations, and it's really important
[00:05:48.520]to remember that energy transition material
[00:05:51.960]is driven by an economical consideration.
[00:05:54.600]It sounds really great and really idealistic to think
[00:05:57.040]that we're just driven by altruistic concerns and climate change.
[00:06:00.200]And it's, of course, incredibly important.
[00:06:03.760]But as I'll show you in Sleipner, Sleipner Fields
[00:06:07.720]was first conceived because the Norwegian
[00:06:11.080]energy Company at the time, which has changed
[00:06:13.320]its name to about six times so we won't bother with their old name,
[00:06:17.160]didn't want to pay a carbon tax,
[00:06:20.120]so they started sequestering or storing that carbon dioxide, right,
[00:06:23.560]because they just didn't want to pay the carbon tax.
[00:06:27.120]So it's not economically feasible to switch away from fossil based systems.
[00:06:30.920]It's kind of alluded to and this is where mitigation strategies
[00:06:34.960]like CC US or CCS come in and CC us.
[00:06:39.720]So six tons of carbon capture.
[00:06:42.840]Sometimes we use it to do things and storage
[00:06:46.880]and it's really the storage that I'm going to talk about in this talk.
[00:06:51.880]So what we need to think about in terms of storage resources
[00:06:56.520]or what makes a suitable rock that debt.
[00:07:00.000]Now obviously all rocks are good rocks.
[00:07:03.680]All rocks are good rocks,
[00:07:08.120]despite
[00:07:08.520]the fact that I just have to get rid of some of my childhood rock collection.
[00:07:11.760]All rocks are good rocks.
[00:07:13.560]But what you need to do is you need to find a rock
[00:07:16.440]that is got integrity, i.e.
[00:07:19.440]it's not going to fall apart on you.
[00:07:22.600]That's really what integrity means in this case.
[00:07:26.360]And inject tivity, which means that the thing
[00:07:31.440]is going to be able to slow
[00:07:35.320]carbon dioxide and you can
[00:07:37.240]get that carbon dioxide into the system.
[00:07:41.880]So in the image here, which is from any key of national Energy
[00:07:45.920]Transition Laboratory, you've got three really key units.
[00:07:50.960]You've got this one down here, which is a saline formation
[00:07:55.760]where the carbon dioxide is stored in basically dirty water.
[00:08:00.840]And dirty water is what you don't want to drink.
[00:08:04.680]Now, there is actually a technical definition for dirty water.
[00:08:07.680]In this case, saline formations have to be 10,000 or above, preferably 20,000.
[00:08:14.000]We would prefer them to be 20,000, but 10,000 is the limit
[00:08:18.120]parts per million total dissolved solids, i.e.
[00:08:21.880]bits.
[00:08:23.320]So that really means that it's
[00:08:27.040]going to be dusty and full of stuff that you don't want to drink.
[00:08:30.840]For comparison, a US DWI United States drinking
[00:08:34.800]water has to be 500 parts per million
[00:08:40.120]total dissolved
[00:08:40.840]solids as an absolute maximum.
[00:08:43.960]So by the time you get to 10,000,
[00:08:46.080]you must understand that it will be pretty foul
[00:08:48.160]and you don't want to drink it, which means you can put all those things into it
[00:08:52.440]and kind of push that saline fluid out of the way
[00:08:56.200]and make a bubble of carbon dioxide.
[00:09:01.440]You can store carbon dioxide
[00:09:03.640]number two in oil and natural gas reservoirs.
[00:09:07.760]If you've taken some of the oil and natural gas out.
[00:09:12.840]And we sometimes use carbon dioxide as a floating system
[00:09:17.160]to push the rest of the oil out of the system.
[00:09:21.520]So this is called ITO all or enhanced oil recovery.
[00:09:26.120]And what we try and do that is kind of get a two for one,
[00:09:29.480]and it's not terribly efficient, but it will do.
[00:09:32.600]And you post carbon dioxide down and you push carbon dioxide
[00:09:36.960]into the reservoir and you pull oil out of a different well somewhere else.
[00:09:44.800]And again,
[00:09:46.440]you can sometimes do the same thing
[00:09:49.040]in an on mineable coal seam.
[00:09:52.200]You can store carbon dioxide and you can push methane out of it
[00:09:58.560]in about the same fashion as you are doing for EOL
[00:10:02.400]enhanced oil recovery.
[00:10:07.440]So here with some rather
[00:10:09.240]glorious rocks, these are suitable rocks.
[00:10:13.120]These are rocks that we looked at.
[00:10:15.120]My student Simon, I at the core research
[00:10:17.920]facility in Denver in Colorado.
[00:10:21.480]So this example, all this white stuff here, this my notebook
[00:10:26.960]and my pen and my measuring tape, because I'm literally measuring
[00:10:31.680]how much of every kind of rock there is in this core
[00:10:35.400]all the way down.
[00:10:38.320]This is a thing called the atmosphere
[00:10:40.400]Dolomite, which is calcium, magnesium carbonate.
[00:10:44.000]And you can see that it's got some nice cracks in it.
[00:10:50.880]Those are
[00:10:51.400]actually real and not just a function of the drilling.
[00:10:55.480]It's got some slugs taken out of it
[00:10:58.280]where people have taken samples and sometimes people is me
[00:11:02.760]and it's got some nice wiggly bits
[00:11:07.280]which you can also
[00:11:09.560]essentially make a gap in and put carbon dioxide in.
[00:11:13.760]This will react with carbon dioxide right a little bit and track the carbon
[00:11:18.480]dioxide in a mineralogical trapping mechanism.
[00:11:22.720]This red mudstone above which is got some salt flats
[00:11:27.120]and this is all salt is a very solid kind of rock unit
[00:11:31.920]that is imperious and impermeable but doesn't let anything flow through it
[00:11:37.320]and just kind of sits there and looks at you and sits there and looks at the carbon
[00:11:40.880]dioxide slightly more to the point and doesn't allow carbon dioxide.
[00:11:45.560]So it acts as a seal over the top to stop anything trying to escape.
[00:11:53.000]So it's got to be
[00:11:53.880]porous, which some of this is with all these little gaps in it.
[00:11:58.080]And it's got to be permeable.
[00:12:00.200]It's got to be able to flow the fluids.
[00:12:03.600]Now, hold on a minute.
[00:12:04.960]Carbon dioxide is a gas.
[00:12:06.960]What am I talking about?
[00:12:08.160]The kind of pressures we're actually talking about.
[00:12:11.160]You've got to be 3000 or so feet on the ground.
[00:12:14.880]Carbon dioxide is usually supercritical, has to be supercritical to get it
[00:12:19.960]to go underground and stay underground in the way that we want it to do.
[00:12:23.920]And this image is a again and image.
[00:12:28.960]It's a fluid state of carbon dioxide rates held
[00:12:31.640]at or above critical temperature and pressure.
[00:12:34.760]So it's basically behaving like a fluid, but it's kind of like a gas as well.
[00:12:40.400]And you can see in this image at ground level,
[00:12:44.400]carbon dioxide is a gas that will fill a very, very big balloon
[00:12:50.160]as you go down in depth.
[00:12:51.760]And we're now one kilometer,
[00:12:55.200]so out on 3000 face carbon dioxide.
[00:13:01.000]And that's where we get to a critical level.
[00:13:05.880]You can compress it.
[00:13:08.080]But that critical that bar,
[00:13:11.680]which is, as I said, it's on 3000 feet.
[00:13:14.120]That's a little bit of dickering as to exactly where that is.
[00:13:17.280]In some of our rock layers, you can get to the density of CO2
[00:13:23.800]changing and it's behaving as a as essentially as a fluid,
[00:13:28.440]which means it pumps much more easily into a brine.
[00:13:32.880]So what do we need to know
[00:13:34.680]about our rocks in order to start thinking about them?
[00:13:37.680]And we'll talk a little bit about western Nebraska.
[00:13:40.920]And this again is rocks laid out at the coastal
[00:13:45.520]graduate students, a scale
[00:13:49.480]this map here
[00:13:51.360]is the official rocks in western Nebraska.
[00:13:55.200]And so this is or at least is bedrock of western Nebraska.
[00:14:00.240]You've got some these are the rocks that make
[00:14:05.880]Chimney Rock and Scottsbluff.
[00:14:08.280]This is where we are.
[00:14:10.120]That's up towards Pine Ridge.
[00:14:12.400]And some slightly older rocks were towards the South Dakota border.
[00:14:17.920]And these green splotches with little code numbers are
[00:14:22.640]where we actually were able to examine core from.
[00:14:26.640]And you'll see this yellow is the youngest rock
[00:14:30.400]these where there are slightly older rocks and slightly older rocks in the darker
[00:14:35.240]green are rocks that are cut down into the river valley.
[00:14:40.680]That's the North Platte.
[00:14:42.240]So you can sort of see that shape going there.
[00:14:45.240]There's another river valley.
[00:14:46.800]Here is the Republican.
[00:14:50.400]So there are core locations.
[00:14:55.240]You can see also are counties that give you a sense of where you are
[00:14:59.640]in western Nebraska.
[00:15:03.200]So again, here is another glorious rock
[00:15:07.080]where the penny and my tape measure the scale.
[00:15:11.880]And what I wanted to show you here
[00:15:14.520]is that these, again, are real cracks in the rock
[00:15:18.760]and that this is one of those wiggly lines which we call a style alliance.
[00:15:24.240]And now I need to put my pen down, my pointer down, and just articulate
[00:15:28.560]a style, a light is formed when you put pressure on a carbonates
[00:15:35.160]and you get
[00:15:38.480]dissolution
[00:15:39.520]preferentially kind of along the Wiggles
[00:15:42.800]where my fingers
[00:15:46.640]are meshing together,
[00:15:49.000]the dark colors point to
[00:15:53.280]where it's leaving
[00:15:56.280]little bits of impure
[00:15:58.240]material that wasn't calcium carbonate.
[00:16:02.760]And then you've got a nice crack along here
[00:16:07.640]that's been slightly eroded away
[00:16:10.680]and crack that that was cracked out by the drillers.
[00:16:14.520]There's my debt marker
[00:16:18.080]marked by whomever drilled this particular core.
[00:16:22.600]And these are the kind of rocks that we were looking for.
[00:16:26.400]We brought them back to our colleagues over
[00:16:29.160]at the Energy Systems Research Lab in Engineering
[00:16:33.680]to look at porosity and permeability in those rocks
[00:16:38.520]type rocks, i.e.
[00:16:39.960]rocks that are impermeable and really low porosity, make really great seals, i.e.
[00:16:45.600]they sit on top of your storage rock
[00:16:48.480]and they stop the carbon dioxide from escaping.
[00:16:52.200]So what you're seeing here is a mud rock,
[00:16:56.240]probably with some algal mats in it.
[00:17:00.360]That's what these yellow looking stringers are.
[00:17:04.920]Little cracks from the drilling
[00:17:08.360]and this is salts
[00:17:12.920]which can be dissolved by water,
[00:17:15.560]but not by carbon dioxide terribly well.
[00:17:19.080]And this doesn't allow the carbon dioxide to get through.
[00:17:24.040]It just kind of sits there and looks at you.
[00:17:28.360]So we brought these rocks back
[00:17:31.080]to the energy Systems Research Group, which is over in engineering.
[00:17:35.760]And these numbers tell you which core they came from
[00:17:41.880]tells you
[00:17:43.600]the sizes of the little gaps
[00:17:46.080]between the particles
[00:17:49.240]and the range of our porosity.
[00:17:52.240]So we have this is our porosity column.
[00:17:55.840]So we have a porosity that's incredibly low.
[00:17:59.400]In one of the samples and some porosity
[00:18:03.480]that are really quite high, 24, 22%.
[00:18:08.120]Those are the kind of numbers that we're really getting excited about.
[00:18:11.800]Now for reference, when I used to work in the oil industry
[00:18:15.080]in northern Iraq, we got really excited.
[00:18:18.480]My twenties, you get quite excited.
[00:18:21.280]My 20 and above porosity percent.
[00:18:24.480]For reference again, we'll get to shine in a field
[00:18:27.640]that porosity the porosity of the etc..
[00:18:29.880]Sandstone in Sleipner is 35 to 40%.
[00:18:33.520]That's 35% down
[00:18:36.840]in that role in the Sleipner field.
[00:18:40.240]So there's quite a lot of range in some of these core samples,
[00:18:45.200]but it does give us hope
[00:18:50.360]that parts of these rocks in western Nebraska
[00:18:53.320]are actually going to be receptive, even if they need a little stimulation
[00:18:57.560]and a little treatment, which I can talk about a little bit later.
[00:19:00.080]It's Energy Assistance research group work rather than our own.
[00:19:04.400]These rock cuttings were what we used,
[00:19:07.280]what they used to investigate the poor size,
[00:19:11.240]and that was a technique called mercury intrusion, porous symmetry.
[00:19:15.200]And what you basically do in MEP is you have a rock coating
[00:19:20.000]and you force them.
[00:19:23.200]I mercury under high pressure
[00:19:28.080]into the the rock,
[00:19:31.360]the rock chip.
[00:19:33.000]Here is one rock chip, here is another sets
[00:19:35.320]of rock chips from a couple of these different samples.
[00:19:38.760]These are from La Teeth's feces.
[00:19:41.840]So I should probably properly acknowledge that most of these
[00:19:46.280]many of these other images are from sands basis.
[00:19:48.640]I should also properly acknowledge that
[00:19:52.600]what what you do in mercury intrusion for symmetry, as I said,
[00:19:55.360]is you force mercury into the system and then you can image
[00:19:59.360]the cost structure of that rock.
[00:20:03.000]This is where these minimum maximum and mean
[00:20:05.920]poor side meet and median pore sizes are coming from.
[00:20:09.960]And this calculation ocean of porosity
[00:20:16.200]energy systems also did some calculations of permeability.
[00:20:20.400]A lot of that is in Lutz Heath's thesis.
[00:20:24.240]And we also talked a little bit about trying to stimulate
[00:20:28.320]or use acid to dissolve some of these rock a little bit
[00:20:32.280]to make them even more receptive to carbon
[00:20:35.400]dioxide storage.
[00:20:39.040]What we finally ended up doing, and this was part of Sam's thesis
[00:20:42.520]and this is a bit of a watch, this space, this is where we're going next is using
[00:20:46.880]CO2 screen, which is a tool from ETL, the National Energy Technology Laboratory,
[00:20:54.320]to to
[00:20:55.560]predict how much carbon dioxide you can store in a given area.
[00:21:00.240]So what it's asking you to do is it asks you to
[00:21:04.240]give it an area and thickness and an average porosity
[00:21:09.840]and a pressure at the bottom of the hole that you've drilled
[00:21:13.440]and a temperature did so.
[00:21:15.840]And since standard deviations of all of those numbers
[00:21:21.680]and then it asks you to tinker with the efficient see,
[00:21:25.360]because this is why I'm not terribly comfortable showing you the final results,
[00:21:28.920]because we're not very happy with some of these efficiency factors.
[00:21:32.880]And this is something that.
[00:21:33.800]So he came and I are going back and forth and
[00:21:37.680]kind of exploring the sensitivity analysis
[00:21:40.440]in that parameter space.
[00:21:43.800]We know something about how much
[00:21:47.440]fluid the carbon dioxide can displace.
[00:21:51.000]We know something about the net to gross thickness in our area.
[00:21:55.920]But what's Kobra does that one of the models
[00:22:00.760]or IEA, you can pick one or the other of these two things
[00:22:05.040]is that they pre populate some of these parameters for us.
[00:22:09.120]And what we would like to do and I and I'm hoping
[00:22:12.160]to have a new student coming in to look at some of this.
[00:22:15.600]And so he is also hoping to have a student look at some of this is to try
[00:22:19.800]some of the older versions of these efficiency factors and see
[00:22:25.680]what happens if you trying this number on that number, on this number
[00:22:29.160]and this number and that number and that number, do some sensitivity
[00:22:32.920]testing on these models because we don't really know what they do.
[00:22:38.040]What we did find
[00:22:39.120]out is that in the areas in western Nebraska that we were looking at,
[00:22:43.560]you're getting at least 70 million tons storage over 20, over 20 years.
[00:22:48.640]Now, for reference,
[00:22:51.920]the dictator plant that I'll show you
[00:22:54.440]emits 4.2 million tons of carbon dioxide in a given year.
[00:22:59.640]So in a chunk of western Nebraska, we can store 70
[00:23:04.040]million tons as a conservative estimate over 20 years,
[00:23:09.600]which is a reasonably standard injection right.
[00:23:13.560]That's quite good going and could probably keep up
[00:23:17.760]with a lot of the ethanol production
[00:23:20.840]in this state.
[00:23:24.120]So let's switch gears to Decatur.
[00:23:26.680]This is a demonstration field in Illinois.
[00:23:29.640]So run by a team,
[00:23:32.400]it injects into a sandstone, which is one of those dirty water formations.
[00:23:36.840]And this CO2 is a byproduct. As I said,
[00:23:42.760]about
[00:23:44.320]which emits
[00:23:46.880]about 4.2 million tons in a year.
[00:23:51.200]So this project is
[00:23:53.360]one of the more advanced in the U.S.
[00:23:56.560]There are different priorities in the US and in the in the rest of the world
[00:24:00.640]about what we should do in terms of energy transition.
[00:24:05.040]Right now, the rest of the Europeans are really, really focused on hydrogen.
[00:24:10.040]The US is kind of catching up about hydrogen.
[00:24:12.840]The US is really quite excited.
[00:24:14.720]The Department of Energy is really quite excited about carbon dioxide storage.
[00:24:18.480]And so if one does a quick Google search for carbon dioxide storage projects,
[00:24:23.200]you get an enormous amount of possible projects looking at capture and storage.
[00:24:27.920]And I'll show you some of those projections towards the end.
[00:24:31.920]So what's exciting about Decatur
[00:24:35.760]is that it's one of the few to have the right permits
[00:24:39.000]that actually be able to store carbon dioxide,
[00:24:43.880]and you have to have the right permits to drill
[00:24:47.640]the right kind of well to store this stuff because it's buoyant
[00:24:52.560]and it does not want to stay on the ground terribly efficiently.
[00:24:56.480]We want it to stay underground.
[00:24:58.120]It does not want
[00:25:00.240]you see, we have problems.
[00:25:02.200]So a Class six well has to be incredibly well characterized
[00:25:06.120]and it has to be built a little different than an oil
[00:25:08.640]well or a water well, because water typically wants to stay where you put it.
[00:25:12.800]Oil wants to come out with a bit of bit of encouragement.
[00:25:16.960]Carbon dioxide does not want to do what you want it to do.
[00:25:20.840]So this is the EPA class six permit
[00:25:24.880]tracker, and it's not really a digression if it's a scheduled digression.
[00:25:27.640]Right, Right.
[00:25:30.200]My classes know this, it's fine.
[00:25:33.480]So let's look at Aden's latest
[00:25:39.720]permit.
[00:25:42.960]Region 456789.
[00:25:45.560]Refer to the energy to the EPA's different areas.
[00:25:49.520]So we live in region seven.
[00:25:53.280]There are two carbon capture projects,
[00:25:56.200]Russell and Energy in Region seven
[00:26:00.120]and they are both in Kansas
[00:26:03.120]and that Russell is making some progress.
[00:26:06.840]Current energy is stopped at the notice
[00:26:12.360]of deficiency applicant responding stage.
[00:26:17.400]So let's look at Adam.
[00:26:21.520]They have to demonstrate that
[00:26:23.800]they have all their ducks in a row for the permits.
[00:26:33.840]They didn't have their ducks in a row.
[00:26:36.720]They responded that ducks were not yet in a row.
[00:26:41.240]They responded.
[00:26:42.800]You have to do an enormous amount of characterizing of these rocks before
[00:26:45.920]your ducks are considered to be in a row and that means basically drilling
[00:26:49.280]a stratigraphic control well to get a core,
[00:26:53.960]really deep core, doing all the kind of logging and measurements.
[00:26:58.640]So I'd just briefly describe for Nebraska on every last little bit of that
[00:27:03.880]course you can imagine, drilling a well costs millions.
[00:27:07.800]These kind of tests cost hundreds.
[00:27:11.440]It's an expensive process, but I think it's probably worth it.
[00:27:16.880]We'll talk about the cost, the the sort of ramifications in a little bit.
[00:27:22.240]Ethereum
[00:27:24.360]are in the technical review stage,
[00:27:27.080]and you can see
[00:27:29.920]that that's a little at the technical review stage.
[00:27:32.880]Adam, on the Decatur campus, their new one
[00:27:36.120]is likely to run into January 25.
[00:27:40.680]So they started
[00:27:44.120]in about March or May of 23.
[00:27:50.280]We're in February of 24.
[00:27:55.480]There is a draft permit,
[00:27:58.320]a comment period.
[00:28:01.200]And what the comment period usually brings up is,
[00:28:04.240]is this going to cause earthquakes?
[00:28:08.520]We might as well open the can of worms.
[00:28:11.880]Is this going to cause earthquakes?
[00:28:14.280]And it's something we looked at a little bit in the Nebraska system.
[00:28:18.720]There are some
[00:28:21.240]old fault lines in parts of the Nebraska system
[00:28:25.400]which have had some earthquakes on them in
[00:28:30.960]recent years.
[00:28:32.400]If you're talking geologically recent being,
[00:28:34.560]you know, back in 2018, 19, that's definitely recent.
[00:28:39.080]If you're a geologist,
[00:28:40.200]may not be terribly recent to the rest of you,
[00:28:41.920]but it's definitely reason to be a geologist.
[00:28:44.360]And we're still trying to understand a little bit about why some of that happens.
[00:28:49.800]So this is the kind of thing that always comes up in a public comment period.
[00:28:55.680]I can totally address that in a little bit.
[00:28:57.560]I'm trying to stay on topic a little as much as I can.
[00:29:01.680]We're trying we're really trying.
[00:29:05.200]That's always the sort of thing that comes up
[00:29:06.960]in this public comment period and then there has to be response
[00:29:12.880]to that period.
[00:29:13.880]So that is one of the reasons that these wells take so long to drill
[00:29:18.880]and to actually get organized and to characterize.
[00:29:24.840]And one of the big issues in CHS is
[00:29:27.800]then once you've actually got this thing permitted,
[00:29:32.040]this is an issue for diagram
[00:29:36.280]and this is a little bit old,
[00:29:38.000]but it's so possibly accurate is not the
[00:29:42.000]not only the due diligence of the start, but it's the ongoing bonding in the US.
[00:29:46.480]At least we have a 50 year bonding commitments to that.
[00:29:52.160]We have to keep paying to monitor,
[00:29:55.760]and that's an at least 50 year bonding period at the EPA's discretion.
[00:29:59.560]They can make it longer.
[00:30:03.080]They don't have a tendency to make it shorter at their discretion.
[00:30:06.920]They can make it longer.
[00:30:09.000]They don't intend to make it shorter.
[00:30:10.720]But we have to keep monitoring those wells to make sure
[00:30:14.160]that the carbon dioxide stays exactly where we think it is staying.
[00:30:17.960]And that becomes a challenge.
[00:30:20.560]When you look at Wells Field like Sleipner,
[00:30:26.520]this is Norway in the EU.
[00:30:29.440]And so we've got
[00:30:32.440]whole
[00:30:34.320]and Norway and the northern North Sea
[00:30:38.640]and everybody because about who the northern North Sea belongs to
[00:30:43.160]and slight enough field is to us,
[00:30:46.200]the brown on the Norwegian side.
[00:30:49.120]And every so often back home there's the politic argument about
[00:30:53.560]well this person drilled the horizontal well into my gas field,
[00:30:56.760]both of them.
[00:31:00.080]What you've got here
[00:31:02.280]is an image of the various pieces
[00:31:06.960]of the Sleipner platform from
[00:31:10.560]this is the main Sleipner gas machine, which now processes
[00:31:15.160]a lot of gas from a number of other places in the North Sea
[00:31:19.680]because the Sleipner field itself is almost exhausted of gas.
[00:31:23.240]And then these are some of this is part of one of the other platforms like Tee
[00:31:28.520]that is starting to pump carbon dioxide back
[00:31:31.680]into another part of the system.
[00:31:36.160]So what's going on?
[00:31:37.440]This is the image I showed you this slide, not a gas gathering and production.
[00:31:43.040]And what they're pulling from the ground is methane mixed with carbon dioxide
[00:31:47.760]slightly to strips and re compressors.
[00:31:50.880]That's the little dude I just showed you in the middle.
[00:31:54.160]And then in this schematic
[00:31:56.520]diagram here, carbon dioxide is injected
[00:31:59.760]underneath zero, which is the formation that we care about.
[00:32:03.840]Sierra are really big fat sandstone.
[00:32:07.600]And when a geologist talks about a massive sandstone,
[00:32:11.440]it means a sandstone that is kind of featureless, just
[00:32:17.680]a single set that's a lot, but it just kind of sits there and looks at you.
[00:32:20.840]Feel like I've said that a few times now,
[00:32:23.800]according to my students, one of the other things I say
[00:32:25.800]is does what it says on the tin.
[00:32:28.160]But apparently today's quote catch phrase is sits there and looks at you
[00:32:32.400]cross to as I said, it's 35 to 40%.
[00:32:34.920]I think I mentioned that a little bit earlier.
[00:32:37.000]And the general idea from
[00:32:39.040]the Sleipner field is that what was going to happen in Serra
[00:32:42.960]is they were going to pump carbon dioxide underneath that Sierra
[00:32:46.880]and it was going to be buoyant to rise until it hits the seal formation,
[00:32:52.400]which is one of the curate's clay systems, i.e.
[00:32:56.800]a mudstone that is really very tight and very impermeable.
[00:33:02.440]And it's going to make these little blooms
[00:33:05.480]in different parts of the sandstone, because the sandstone isn't
[00:33:09.360]quite as featureless as this word massive would have you believe.
[00:33:13.440]It's got different bits in it that are more
[00:33:16.440]or slightly less porous than the rest of it.
[00:33:20.880]And I couldn't resist showing you a line
[00:33:23.480]through the North Sea because this is really, really glorious.
[00:33:29.040]So what you're looking at
[00:33:31.920]from west to east, from west to east,
[00:33:37.160]is a vertical picture
[00:33:42.000]of resistant
[00:33:44.040]layers of rock underneath the ground.
[00:33:48.320]So a source of
[00:33:54.040]of energy was set up here,
[00:33:57.640]and that energy has bounced off all these resistant layers.
[00:34:03.000]And this is the seafloor
[00:34:07.840]where there's a contrast
[00:34:09.200]between rock and water.
[00:34:12.200]And so pretty much as a first class,
[00:34:16.760]every time you see a big heavy line,
[00:34:20.360]here's the top of the Sierra,
[00:34:25.840]here we go.
[00:34:27.680]You're seeing rock and rock
[00:34:30.520]be underneath each other, all stacked on top of each other English.
[00:34:36.240]There we go.
[00:34:37.800]So that's a lower layer.
[00:34:40.400]Amu stands for mid Miocene Unconformity.
[00:34:43.440]If you care about the North Sea geology and this dark line here is just a marker
[00:34:50.000]for a different kind of rock that has a little bit of a different signal.
[00:34:54.480]And if you are interested in these kind of images,
[00:34:57.360]you dig into these kind of images a great deal
[00:35:00.400]and you spend a lot of time thinking, Will this has this kind of pattern
[00:35:03.800]and that has that kind of pattern, Then that has the other kind of pattern.
[00:35:07.280]And so I can find out a lot about these kinds of rocks.
[00:35:11.880]What's
[00:35:12.200]interesting is why the reason I wanted to show you this is
[00:35:16.400]the Sierra is quite the Sierra formation has this
[00:35:20.880]mud rock called the Shale,
[00:35:23.840]similar kind of thing
[00:35:25.840]across the top, which makes that beautiful seal.
[00:35:30.960]And then it's very, very thick in here.
[00:35:34.840]These
[00:35:37.400]where you see this big black squiggle
[00:35:39.320]is where there's a lot of sandstone.
[00:35:42.400]There's another well drilled with a lot of sandstone in it.
[00:35:45.400]There's a sandstone up here
[00:35:46.560]which is too shallow because it is exposed to the surface.
[00:35:49.760]Can you see that
[00:35:50.520]this one doesn't have anybody on top of it to stop anything escaping?
[00:35:54.360]So if you put something in here, it would just run away.
[00:36:00.120]But this one is kind of hidden
[00:36:03.600]underground in this nice little lens shape.
[00:36:09.480]It's been operating CCS since about 1991.
[00:36:13.040]And I think I alluded to the fact that that was because
[00:36:17.360]what was I think most hydro at the time
[00:36:20.080]wanted to avoid the carbon dioxide tax.
[00:36:24.320]They were flaring so much carbon dioxide because the gas
[00:36:27.480]they're pulling from underground is partly methane, partly carbon dioxide.
[00:36:31.000]It's about 20% carbon dioxide that they were going to have to pay
[00:36:34.600]billions in a carbon dioxide tax.
[00:36:37.920]And they didn't.
[00:36:40.400]It stored around 22 million tons to date.
[00:36:45.120]That number is constantly changing
[00:36:47.600]because they are still storing.
[00:36:51.120]But one of the things we've learned from Sleipner
[00:36:54.880]is that the ongoing cost of monitoring, continuous sea plants
[00:37:00.200]when it doesn't quite go as you expected, but very, very significant.
[00:37:06.040]So the interesting thing,
[00:37:08.240]the wonderful and weird and exciting if you're a geologist,
[00:37:11.800]but not quite so exciting if you're a regulator.
[00:37:14.280]Thing about Sleipner is that they only expected eight last.
[00:37:21.200]You remember I showed you a diagram that has
[00:37:24.960]plumes of carbon dioxide.
[00:37:28.320]They were expecting eight layers.
[00:37:33.160]This number is bigger than eight.
[00:37:35.600]There are nine layers in the sphere of formation,
[00:37:40.280]which we didn't notice or see or spot or find
[00:37:44.640]or I don't know, because I did not work on this field.
[00:37:48.120]So I do not know.
[00:37:50.600]There's the injection point,
[00:37:53.560]there's the initial plumes.
[00:37:56.040]And this is a rather lovely timelapse layer showing the and the highlights,
[00:38:01.520]the kind of neon layers are showing you where you've got
[00:38:06.720]carbon dioxide spreading.
[00:38:10.720]And this is the bit
[00:38:12.120]that got everybody a little bit squirrely.
[00:38:16.200]There's layer nine coming in
[00:38:20.600]and this is the bit that was a little bit unexpected that,
[00:38:25.280]but that's where the carbon dioxide plume is.
[00:38:29.640]So going back to that, this is why the North Americans
[00:38:33.360]particularly spend a lot of time making us plan and bond
[00:38:37.360]and why it's so difficult to drill these wells
[00:38:41.640]because when it goes unexpected,
[00:38:44.400]it really can be very challenging.
[00:38:47.520]It's not impossible.
[00:38:49.000]The carbon dioxide hasn't escaped us.
[00:38:52.440]It's just gone somewhere.
[00:38:53.640]We didn't quite expect it to grow.
[00:38:56.040]And so the ongoing monitoring costs
[00:39:01.400]and possible
[00:39:03.000]contingency plan, what are we going to do if it does go somewhere else?
[00:39:07.040]We didn't expect it to likely
[00:39:10.600]because Sarah Formation
[00:39:13.560]is such a very enclosed loop,
[00:39:19.480]it isn't going to break through the shale, right?
[00:39:23.760]We don't have a major problem of escape,
[00:39:28.560]but what we do have
[00:39:30.720]is a few unexpected things.
[00:39:33.640]So I do want to highlight
[00:39:35.000]that the ongoing costs of that monitoring can be quite significant.
[00:39:38.880]That being said, the ongoing costs of monitoring
[00:39:42.360]being significant, are they higher than doing nothing?
[00:39:46.920]Let us not forget
[00:39:48.360]what we're actually talking, why we are actually talking about this.
[00:39:52.400]These are Mauna Loa.
[00:39:53.280]Mauna Kea dates are pulled on to 25, 24.
[00:39:58.800]These are scripts and NOA data.
[00:40:01.680]So this is the keeling of the
[00:40:05.680]and a couple actual data points from January 24 and January 23.
[00:40:10.240]We know that carbon dioxide is rising in the atmosphere.
[00:40:13.800]I thought it was probably important
[00:40:15.120]to bring us back to this point and think about why we are thinking at all
[00:40:20.400]about storing carbon dioxide on the ground.
[00:40:23.520]Remember, but this is just this this one here is a zoom
[00:40:27.440]in of this little piece here, The red line on the Keeling Curve.
[00:40:33.720]Here is the seasonal fluctuation.
[00:40:38.360]The black is a seven season moving average,
[00:40:43.680]having taken the fluctuation out.
[00:40:48.480]So you can see even with a little bit of wiggle,
[00:40:52.120]it's still inexorably going up.
[00:40:57.200]My last point
[00:40:59.880]is this one.
[00:41:01.640]But what you've got this is an IEA image
[00:41:05.440]looking at what we've got in 2002
[00:41:09.000]West full change means capture and storage.
[00:41:13.200]And these are looks for the planned and projected
[00:41:18.480]capturing capture and storage
[00:41:22.120]capture and storage capture and storage,
[00:41:27.360]capture and storage
[00:41:29.640]projections up into 2030.
[00:41:33.520]This is just for the US side.
[00:41:36.440]But this IEA graph,
[00:41:39.560]this one Googles, it is an interactive widget
[00:41:42.680]that one can pull down by country or by all countries,
[00:41:46.800]and one can play with it in terms of different sources
[00:41:51.040]of carbon dioxide and so on and so on and so forth.
[00:41:54.520]So I think CCS has got to be here to stay.
[00:41:58.320]It's part of our toolkit in tackling
[00:42:02.160]our energy transition and our carbon dioxide problem.
[00:42:06.320]And I will also highlight I have to astrology, Professor,
[00:42:10.320]that there really are roles for geologists pivoting away
[00:42:14.080]from traditional energy employment opportunities
[00:42:18.640]because energy transition, science,
[00:42:21.520]the things that I've been talking about, doesn't use anything
[00:42:25.720]particularly different than the skills you always used to use.
[00:42:30.840]Thank you.
[00:42:38.200]Have I left you time for questions?
[00:42:51.840]And when you're in rock
[00:42:55.000]that may not quite reach
[00:42:58.960]the chemical structure that you want,
[00:43:03.640]Do you think there is a future of
[00:43:08.600]the new idea that there are certain bacteria
[00:43:10.760]that can help fix within rock that aren't quite what you want?
[00:43:15.960]I think that that is a little outside my specialty.
[00:43:19.320]But what I do know is that
[00:43:23.440]we know very, very firmly within the energy transition
[00:43:27.960]that microbial hydrogen work
[00:43:31.480]is an enormous growing place.
[00:43:34.440]And so within the carbon dioxide fixing system,
[00:43:40.440]I can only assume
[00:43:43.440]that it's a slightly different process,
[00:43:47.120]but it has to be investigated
[00:43:50.040]because we are learning so much more
[00:43:54.200]about the role of geo microbial ology
[00:43:57.320]within building rocks, within
[00:44:01.720]altering sedimentary systems, altering these depositional systems
[00:44:07.680]that I think it's something
[00:44:09.120]we'd be foolish to overlook.
[00:44:16.760]The question when you it
[00:44:20.200]you know where you identify or not.
[00:44:23.480]Yeah.
[00:44:24.680]What is that But
[00:44:28.320]what would that future
[00:44:30.840]study this one.
[00:44:32.040]Which one?
[00:44:33.960]This one or that one.
[00:44:36.480]This guy it is a seismic volume
[00:44:40.080]that has had all this seismic stripped out.
[00:44:43.440]It's just so
[00:44:45.800]it's a3d cube.
[00:44:48.000]All of
[00:44:49.840]images
[00:44:52.200]that started off like this
[00:44:54.880]and were laid up stacked together.
[00:44:58.440]So you have a bunch of lines going this way, a bunch of images like this
[00:45:01.760]going this way, and a bunch of images like this going this way.
[00:45:05.520]And instead of having them as analog images, they are digital
[00:45:09.520]and they are data.
[00:45:12.160]So then what happens
[00:45:17.040]to this piece
[00:45:20.760]is that it's been processed such that all that black
[00:45:25.440]and white layer has been taken out and these are geo bodies.
[00:45:31.320]I see.
[00:45:31.920]Those are just the carbon dioxide plumes in the system.
[00:45:37.360]So that's what you're looking at.
[00:45:38.640]You're looking at a 3D cube.
[00:45:42.240]There's the well,
[00:45:45.480]I don't have a great sense of
[00:45:50.120]which way is north because it's slightly proprietary, but
[00:45:55.640]does that answer you enough?
[00:46:01.160]But yeah, it's a seismic record.
[00:46:06.280]Oh, okay.
[00:46:08.680]So it is amplitude variation.
[00:46:10.640]What you can see.
[00:46:14.320]And again, to turn that into a slightly less
[00:46:16.080]technical answer, let's go back to
[00:46:21.480]this image.
[00:46:22.640]This image is in black and white.
[00:46:25.920]I answer my colleague this that that image
[00:46:28.960]is created by amplitude variation.
[00:46:32.080]If this image was in blue and red,
[00:46:35.160]you would see that some bits of it were really, really bright
[00:46:39.040]and some bits of it were really, really dull.
[00:46:43.560]The really, really bright bits we would consider
[00:46:45.960]to be high amplitude and what you can actually track.
[00:46:50.520]We've discovered, and I did not want to get so technical to show you all of these
[00:46:57.600]because there are some beautiful images there,
[00:46:59.080]some this whole glorious but you can actually track over time.
[00:47:04.040]But in parts of the sleipner and actually snow of it, this is the field
[00:47:09.120]you can track that
[00:47:12.120]as you go up through this piece.
[00:47:16.920]Can you see this?
[00:47:18.200]Some little curves.
[00:47:22.640]You look really closely where my pointer is.
[00:47:26.240]You can track in places like this
[00:47:31.560]that the amplitude, the brightness changes
[00:47:35.400]as the carbon dioxide moves through the system.
[00:47:39.280]There are a couple of papers out there
[00:47:41.760]that hint at that
[00:47:44.800]and obviously I'll be glad to share them
[00:47:46.800]with anyone who desperately wants them.
[00:47:50.640]What they're doing is migrating. Yep.
[00:47:55.120]So then maybe more opportunity
[00:47:58.680]to inject that and
[00:48:02.160]that's what they keep doing.
[00:48:04.320]That's why
[00:48:09.080]oh, that is why
[00:48:12.520]Sleipner is still going
[00:48:16.000]and it is a fact.
[00:48:19.840]It's to keep going
[00:48:23.400]for another 20 to 30 years.
[00:48:27.000]We think we hope
[00:48:30.440]a little bit confused about Layer
[00:48:32.000]nine is the general feeling,
[00:48:35.240]but it's supposed to keep going for a while.
[00:48:37.840]I'm going to jump in with a question of my own, Mike,
[00:48:41.680]and it's a super generalist question,
[00:48:44.040]so I'm super generalist,
[00:48:47.480]but you were talking earlier about the process of applying for
[00:48:52.520]getting these projects started and how hard it is to get them started
[00:48:56.520]and that there's a period for commentary
[00:49:00.440]and the worry is about earthquakes.
[00:49:02.840]Yes, and I'm thinking a bit about other kinds of of projects
[00:49:06.960]like wind farms and in Nebraska and the concerns that are raised.
[00:49:10.400]And sometimes they are backed by science and sometimes not so much.
[00:49:15.600]So I'm wondering if how how
[00:49:18.560]big a concern would our neighbors and western Nebraska
[00:49:22.320]be about these kinds of projects coming into their area?
[00:49:26.920]Is it are they it is not so likely or it is possible
[00:49:30.520]that there might be earthquakes or that is unclear at this point?
[00:49:34.360]And are there other concerns that some people might raise that
[00:49:39.960]are worth considering?
[00:49:41.320]The big concern is usually
[00:49:44.560]when we've seen these projects starts develop,
[00:49:48.360]the big concern is usually underground
[00:49:51.640]earthquake events. Now,
[00:49:56.760]with recent events in Oklahoma, Kansas
[00:50:00.840]relates to underground injection of fluid that's on a lot of people's minds.
[00:50:06.560]What I typically say to people is if you have made a big enough earthquake
[00:50:11.520]to feel by doing something like this and this images office is wonderful,
[00:50:17.560]by injecting something into that layer,
[00:50:23.400]what you call kind of
[00:50:25.320]Don is bust your project because you've broken it already.
[00:50:30.960]So it is in my interest and your interest as my neighbor
[00:50:34.920]in western Nebraska not to do that.
[00:50:38.680]And that's the difficulty of getting that balance, the communication difficulty,
[00:50:43.400]because
[00:50:47.760]it is sometimes very much on us and them.
[00:50:51.760]This is a big corporation coming in
[00:50:53.840]trying to do something on my land and I do not want.
[00:50:57.560]But the communication has to start from.
[00:51:00.720]We are both trying to avoid the same thing.
[00:51:04.120]We are both trying to avoid making earthquakes
[00:51:08.040]because
[00:51:09.480]you don't want an earthquake because it is deeply uncomfortable for you.
[00:51:13.320]I don't want an earthquake because I have blown my project wide open.
[00:51:17.440]If I do that,
[00:51:20.880]my rock is broken and my carbon dioxide runs away.
[00:51:25.520]And for about there's a question up here in the chart, actually,
[00:51:28.800]can I answer that one?
[00:51:30.120]The question in the chart is, are there any chemical alterations
[00:51:33.200]to the storage rock after CO2 is stored?
[00:51:36.600]And could that contribute to carbon dioxide escaping?
[00:51:40.920]If so, what are the consequences of CO2 escaping after injection?
[00:51:44.880]So that's two questions.
[00:51:47.800]Chemical alterations actually a good things.
[00:51:52.440]The chemical alterations we usually think of chemical alteration
[00:51:56.400]to the rock system with the carbon dioxide
[00:51:59.800]as trapping the CO2 underground.
[00:52:03.600]As far as we can tell, we want to promote
[00:52:07.080]those chemical alterations to the storage rock.
[00:52:10.160]We want the carbon dioxide to react with the storage rock,
[00:52:13.600]and you choose a storage rock so that the carbon dioxide will react
[00:52:17.360]and stick there.
[00:52:19.440]And so
[00:52:21.720]that typically
[00:52:23.880]doesn't contribute to CO2 escaping.
[00:52:27.040]On the other hand, the big consequence of CO2 escaping,
[00:52:32.120]which is a slightly different question, but I'll I'll try to address it,
[00:52:37.280]is that
[00:52:40.080]you've wasted an awful lot of money
[00:52:41.760]and you haven't achieved what you were trying to achieve.
[00:52:45.120]There's no
[00:52:47.800]that we know of.
[00:52:50.160]And I'll add that caveat,
[00:52:57.760]Major
[00:53:02.560]consequence to mine minus CO2 leakage
[00:53:05.840]that I can say if it's very minor leakage,
[00:53:11.560]what's what I do suspect
[00:53:15.000]is that if your CO2 is not sequestered or stored correctly and staying there,
[00:53:20.360]what you've actually done is wasted an enormous amount of taxpayers money.
[00:53:23.120]And then you have a bunch of angry people.
[00:53:31.200]Nice talk.
[00:53:31.720]Yeah, thanks.
[00:53:33.960]I'll throw in a crackpot question.
[00:53:37.880]Does it water at very high pressure?
[00:53:41.960]Does supercritical CO2 mix fairly well with it?
[00:53:46.040]And so the question is, if I was a crackpot, could I say
[00:53:48.840]if I injected CO2 at 5000 feet down in the ocean, of which there are many spots,
[00:53:53.600]would it simply phase mostly face separate out into its own layer?
[00:53:57.720]And if so, how quickly would it reenter
[00:54:01.080]from from this very deep layer in water?
[00:54:03.000]I mean, there's extremes where methane forms clathrin.
[00:54:05.160]It's like these ice clouds rates then, of course, are kind of frozen out.
[00:54:08.320]This would still be fluid, presumably.
[00:54:10.320]But the question is, how quick is that?
[00:54:12.360]How rapid is the transition between it and the water column?
[00:54:15.840]My instinct is fairly quick, but I don't know.
[00:54:20.880]Okay.
[00:54:21.240]Yeah, I don't know the answer to that one, and I'm hesitant to speculate
[00:54:24.640]in a public forum.
[00:54:25.800]Okay.
[00:54:30.520]Because
[00:54:33.120]you'll have to jog my memory.
[00:54:37.000]How far below
[00:54:39.240]the Ogallala Aquifer and how many impermeable layers
[00:54:43.160]below would the inject should be taking place?
[00:54:47.400]Okay, so the rocks that I was showing you,
[00:54:50.240]my glorious rocks from western Nebraska.
[00:54:53.120]Let me jump back. If I yella
[00:54:57.440]never mind.
[00:54:58.120]My glorious rocks in western Nebraska are the Pennsylvanian
[00:55:02.440]and the Permian
[00:55:05.440]and they are below
[00:55:07.720]the peer shale, which is 2000 feet thick.
[00:55:11.080]So you have the aquifer, the high plains aquifer,
[00:55:14.800]you have cheap feet of shale,
[00:55:17.840]you have a bunch of miscellaneous, all the things
[00:55:20.800]which would be the Jurassic, the Morris information, for example,
[00:55:25.800]and Then you have a bit of Permian,
[00:55:29.600]which is the atmosphere.
[00:55:32.120]No, it's not.
[00:55:32.880]It is the southern corral, which is a big salt layer.
[00:55:35.840]And the stone wall is all type two seal.
[00:55:39.240]So in a carbon dioxide system, you actually want
[00:55:42.200]two seals, you want a top seal and a type one seal.
[00:55:45.360]You you really want to be so sure that this stuff
[00:55:48.840]is not going to run away from you.
[00:55:50.480]So we want what we have been looking out for, our sequester, our storage system
[00:55:55.920]is that you have the salts of the stone Corral,
[00:55:59.920]which is Permian and H, and it's so 250 million years old.
[00:56:06.080]If you are not versed on the top of your head with the age of the Permian,
[00:56:11.880]then Corral is about
[00:56:13.520]is a is a salt layer and it's nice and impermeable.
[00:56:16.920]And then we have a mud rock and then we have all Pennsylvanian limestones
[00:56:23.000]at the Lansing in the Kansas City, and it's the Lansing in the Kansas City,
[00:56:28.600]which are 4000 feet down
[00:56:32.320]and change that we're really looking at.
[00:56:36.920]And so in answer to your original question, separation
[00:56:41.160]between high plains on offer and sequestration unit a lot.
[00:56:45.760]But that's the kind that's the basic geology
[00:56:50.560]on your way down and other places.
[00:56:53.920]Kansas in Patterson Field are also sequestering
[00:56:57.200]sleepy hollow sequesters in the Lansing Kansas City.
[00:57:01.360]There is precedent for sequestering in these units.
[00:57:07.440]Well, we'd like to thank you so much for your talk today,
[00:57:09.760]and I hope everyone will join us for our final lecture
[00:57:13.200]where all of our speakers come and join us together on
[00:57:16.520]March 26.
[00:57:19.440]Well, thank you all. Have a good night.

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Geology in a Green Energy Future | CAS Inquire

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