Industrial and academic partners from Denmark, the Netherlands, the UK, Romania, Greece, China and Canada have joined forces in the European innovation project ConsenCUS – Carbon neutral clusters through electricity-based innovations in Capture, Utilisation and Storage. The aim of the project is to address the problem of CO2 emissions from industrial sectors through development and demonstration of novel carbon capture, conversion, and storage technologies.
Within ConsenCUS, GEUS will focus on de-risking of temporary storage of CO2 in saline aquifers. To this end, a number of geological, geochemical, and hydrodynamical modelling studies will be conducted using the Stenlille and Havnsø geological sites as examples.
“Stenlille is probably the most studied saline aquifer in Denmark, which makes it the best candidate to optimize the strategy for temporary storage. By linking the refined geological modelling for the two sites, we will be able to reduce the uncertainties in storage capacity for the Havnsø structure as well,” says Nikolai Andrianov, researcher in Department for Reservoir Geology at GEUS.
Temporary storage of CO2 offers several possibilities
According to Nikolai Andrianov, there are several reasons why it is desirable to have temporary storage of CO2.
“In case of the pipeline transport between CO2 sources and sinks, temporary storage can be useful for minimizing flow rate variations or for ensuring the flexibility when dealing with constraints such as minimum or maximum pipeline pressures. If shipping is used to deliver CO2 to an offshore site for permanent geological storage, an intermediate buffer storage is required to accommodate for the continuous CO2 flow from an industrial emitter. Looking down the road, there might be an interest in recovering the temporarily stored CO2 to produce commodity chemicals and materials,” Nikolai Andrianov explains.
This is an area, which GEUS has a strong focus on, and according to Maj Wendorff, Head of Department for Reservoir Geology at GEUS, participation in ConsenCUS is a great opportunity for GEUS to use and expand the knowledge and experience that already exists.
“The ConsenCUS project fits perfectly with GEUS’ strategy to build on our extensive research in the field of CO2 storage as well as apply our experience with maturing geological energy and storage solutions in the green energy transition,” says Maj Wendorff.