Energy Transition
Energy Transition | Carbon Capture, Storage and Utilisation
Repurposing Subsurface Petroleum Skills for CCUS
Course Code: N538
Course Outline:
Download
Format and Duration:
3 days
5 sessions
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a key means of mitigating climate change and is the only option currently available to decarbonize industries such as cement, steel, petrochemicals and LNG. As opportunities in oil and gas decline, they are growing in CCS. Human activities now generate about 35Gt of CO2 (1 gigatonne=1 billion tonnes) per year. At ~$50/ton for sequestration, the potential opportunity is enormous, both in new business revenue and in repurposing old assets and delaying decommissioning costs. Mitigation of the worst effects of climate change will require storing billions of tons per year, with an industry to match. In the US alone, the National Petroleum Council estimates that CCS could employ ~230,000 people, similar to the current oil industry. This course empowers attendees to develop and apply their skills to the growing industry of Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS). Attendees will be guided through the lifecycle of a CCUS project with an emphasis on key concepts, processes, and workflows of the CCUS industry. Focus will be on developing the geoscience and engineering skills needed to progress a project.
Schedule
Duration and Training Method
This is a classroom or virtual classroom course comprising a mixture of lectures, discussion, quizzes and interactive exercises.
Course Overview
Learning Outcomes
Participants will learn to:
- Describe what CCUS is, what it does, and why it is important.
- Outline the regulatory, policy, and financial drivers and constraints for CCUS.
- Define the subsurface requirements for a successful storage project, including similarities and differences with oil and gas exploration.
- Design a workflow and perform the key tasks for defining, developing and permitting a CCUS project, including site selection, characterization, risk assessment, and monitoring for operational and post-operational phases.
- Estimate CO2 storage capacity in saline aquifers at reservoir and basin-scales through Dr. Hosseini’s EASiTool, an enhanced analytical simulation tool.
Course Content
Overview of CCUS
- Climate change and the role of CCUS
- What is CCUS?
- Basics of capture, transport, and storage.
- Where are we now and where are we going? – history of CCUS, current global projects, public perception
- Basic concepts of permanence, migration pathways, and project monitoring
- Regulation and policy overview
- Project lifecycle - Characterization and baselines, risk assessment, injection and post-injection
- Business drivers
- Tax incentives, clean fuel standards, penalties/carbon take-back obligation
- Costs
- Permitting overview—key considerations
Subsurface Characterization
- Comparison with petroleum geoscience
- Pressure
- CO2 density and storage window
- Area of Review (AoR) and pressure propagation
- Trapping mechanisms
- Play elements
- Reservoir: injectivity, capacity, depositional systems
- Confining systems: seals, baffles and faults
- Risks: faults, legacy wells and other key risks
- Site screening
- Applied geophysics
- Seismic characterization and monitoring
- Legacy data and new acquisition
- Well design and location
Capacity Estimation and Modeling
- Capacity estimation (static and dynamic)
- Geomechanics
- Pressure propagation
- Frac strength
- Fault reactivation
- Dynamic simulations (visualizations, considerations, software available)
- Case study: Cranfield experience—plume breakthrough and fundamentals of fluid flow
- EasiTool (input and outputs) (All attendees must download and install EasiTool prior to the course)
- Area of Review (AoR) calculation
Risk, Safety and Shallow Monitoring
- The Importance of environmental monitoring
- Safety and risk
- Environmental impact and underground sources of drinking water, soil, and the biosphere
- Public perception
- Permitting
- Shallow-focused monitoring
- Plume monitoring
- Regulations versus technology
Project Development, Permitting and Public Acceptance
- Successes and failures to date, look ahead
- Key considerations
- Designing and permitting a project
Who Should Attend and Prerequisites
This course is aimed at subsurface oil and gas professionals and first-level leaders who would like to develop their skills for the emerging industry of carbon capture and geologic storage (CCUS). It is recommended specifically for:
- Geologists, geophysicists, reservoir engineers and other technical subsurface O&G professionals interested in CCUS
- First-level leaders and others tasked with developing and/or assuring geologic storage for CCUS projects
- Recent graduates in petroleum geoscience and reservoir engineering who want to develop skills in CCUS
Instructors
Alex Bump
Background
Dr. Alex Bump is a geologist with broad experience in both CCUS and in the petroleum industry. He held a variety of exploration roles over 16 years with BP, including Advisor in Structural Geology and Head of Discipline for Exploration Structure and Tectonics. He has worked over 50 basins on 5 continents and taught courses in exploration and structural geology to hundreds of geoscientists in BP and partner companies and universities. Since joining the Gulf Coast Carbon Center in 2019, he has focused on adapting petroleum exploration workflows to defining, screening and de-risking storage sites for CO2. He has authored reports on site screening for IEAGHG and multi-national companies. He is currently leading work on subsurface containment risk assessment and mitigation.
Affiliations & Accreditation
PhD University of Arizona - Structural Geology and Tectonics
BA Williams College - Physics
Courses Taught
N538: Repurposing Subsurface Petroleum Skills for CCUS
N549: Subsurface Characterization, Screening and Site Selection for Geologic CO2 Storage Sites
Seyyed Hosseini
Background
Dr. Seyyed A. Hosseini has a PhD in Petroleum Engineering from University of Tulsa, OK. He currently holds the Research Scientist position at Gulf Coast Carbon Center (GCCC), The Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin working on various topics related to multiphase fluid flow in porous media. GCCC focuses on CO2 enhanced oil recovery and geologic storage, an essential component of CCUS. His team has led multiple field and laboratory studies on many aspects of the CCUS process, including estimating underground storage capacity, optimizing enhanced oil recovery to both store CO2 and recover oil, designing and implementing commercial monitoring programs, and assessing geosystem response to injection. The most recent projects includes 1) monitoring of West Ranch field where CO2 captured from the largest post-combustion, carbon-capture facility in the world is used for EOR operations and 2) the Gulf of Mexico Partnership for Offshore Carbon Storage, one of the first efforts in the U.S. to assess the geologic layers below the seafloor for CO2 storage.
Affiliations & Accreditation
PhD University of Tulsa - Petroleum Engineering
MSc Sharif University of Technology - Biotechnology
BSc University of Isfahan - Chemical Engineering
Courses Taught
N538: Repurposing Subsurface Petroleum Skills for CCUS
Katherine Romanak
Background
Dr. Katherine Romanak is a Research Scientist of the University of Texas at Austin, Bureau of Economic Geology. She is a geochemist who has developed and implemented environmental monitoring programs at several large-scale U.S. Department of Energy CCUS project sites. Dr. Romanak has developed an innovative process-based method for environmental monitoring at CCUS projects and has collaborated on international projects in Canada, Australia, and Japan. She led a response team of scientists to determine that alleged leakage at the Kerr Farm near the Weyburn CO2 Storage project in Canada was a false alarm. She serves on multiple international CCUS Advisory boards and regularly informs global policy within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Affiliations & Accreditation
PhD University of Texas - Geology
MSc University of Texas - Geology
BSc Southern Methodist University - Geology
Courses Taught
N538: Repurposing Subsurface Petroleum Skills for CCUS
N553: Monitoring Geologic CO2 Storage Sites
Accreditation and Certification
CEU: 2.1 Continuing Education Units
PDH: 21 Professional Development Hours
Certificate: Certificate Issued Upon Completion
RPS is accredited by the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET) and is authorized to issue the IACET CEU. We comply with the ANSI/IACET Standard, which is recognised internationally as a standard of excellence in instructional practices.
We issue a Certificate of Attendance which verifies the number of training hours attended. Our courses are generally accepted by most professional licensing boards/associations towards continuing education credits. Please check with your licensing board to determine if the courses and certificate of attendance meet their specific criteria.