Scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have built an observatory in an abandoned gold mine to study how rocks, such as those surrounding carbon stored in geological formations, fracture, the lab said Wednesday. “As important as the subsurface is for U.S. energy strategy, our understanding of how the subsurface responds to common perturbations, such as those caused by pulling fluids out or pushing fluids in, is quite crude,” Susan Hubbard, an associate director of Berkeley Lab who helps lead the Subsurface Technology and Engineering Research, Development and Demonstration Crosscut (SubTER) team, said in a release.
The research is not limited to carbon storage: Studying the subsurface will also be useful in other areas, such as production of oil and gas, or energy production through enhanced geothermal, the release says. “For some applications, such as engineered geothermal systems, you want fluids to move in order to mine the heat from the subsurface, so you want to create fractures. In others, such as carbon capture and sequestration, we’re more interested in making sure fractures don’t grow,” Berkeley Lab geologist Patrick Dobson said in the release.