REGIONAL PARTNERSHIP BEGINS BASALT CO2 STORAGE PROJECT

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
8/2/13

The Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership recently kicked off CO2 injection operations into a basalt flow in southeast Washington state, a pilot researchers there touted as a pioneering effort that could provide data about a promising geology for carbon sequestration. Battelle researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) said they began injecting CO2 into the ancient lava flows half a mile underground at a rate of about 40 tonnes a day on July 17. “Our geologic setting is unique in the [DOE regional] partnerships. It’s the first and only project in the world injecting supercritical CO2 into flood basalt,” Project Manager Pete McGrail of PNNL said in an interview this week.

McGrail said the partnership plans on injecting a total of 1,000 tonnes of CO2—transported by rail from refineries in Washington state and California—at the site, owned by the pulp and paper company Boise Inc., over the next several weeks. Following injection, researchers will conduct monitoring work onsite for the next 14 months, collecting fluid and core samples and tracking what Big Sky expects will the be formation of limestone crystals from the injected CO2 reacting with the calcium and magnesium in the basalt. The $12 million Phase II project is funded mostly with National Energy Technology Laboratory dollars, according to the partnership, and is also supported by companies like Praxair, Schlumberger and Shell.

Unknowns Remain With Basalt Storage

CO2 injection into basalt formations had long been set aside by the CCS community—the lack of information about storing CO2 into the unique geology made it far less attractive for sequestration compared to the experience associated with oil and gas reservoirs and the abundance of saline aquifers—until recently. A major CO2 storage atlas released by the U.S. Geological Survey earlier this summer excluded basalt formations from its calculations. USGS said much was still unknown and that an assessment methodology still needed to be developed before it was prepared to list the geology as a readily available CO2 storage option. 

PNNL researchers had also dismissed basalt injections early on because they thought the geology’s capillary trapping mechanisms were far too slow to be useful for CO2 storage, according to McGrail. ‘The perception 10 years ago was that the timeframe for mineralization was so long,” McGrail said. In 2003, the Lab set aside $25,000 to study CO2 storage in basalts, given their abundance in the Pacific Northwest. Researchers took Columbia River basalts and exposed them to supercritical CO2 at reservoir conditions. “We weren’t expecting to see much,” McGrail said. “We broke open those first experiments after just a few months of reaction time and were just astonished to see the extent of the carbonation that had taken place in such a short period of time. That was really the Eureka moment, the genesis of saying that if we could get mineralization to occur that quickly in a geologic setting, we then really needed to think about how we could test the idea in a field setting.” A recent study by Yale researchers also touts the potential of CO2 storage in basalts because it minimizes the risk of inducing seismic events in the subsurface.

Phase III Work Not Likely

Despite what he said is the large storage potential of basalts, McGrail said he does not anticipate the work to be transitioned into a larger-scale injection project under Phase III of the regional partnership’s activity. While several of the other regional partnerships have moved toward EOR in recent years to attract industry dollars for their large-scale injection work, McGrail said he does not anticipate netting such financing. “The primary difficulty in moving to a larger-scale project in a setting like we’re talking about is that we don’t have any oil or gas reservoirs here,” he said. “The difficulty would be in terms of putting the financial aspects together—what’s the incentive for a company to come in and support a large commercial-scale demonstration? It would be very difficult to do without some sort of revenue stream that could come in.” Meanwhile, the Big Sky Carbon Sequestration Partnership, led by Montana State University, is moving forward on large-scale storage work into a saline reservoir in Montana’s Kevin Dome. While that work is not enhanced oil recovery-based either, one of Big Sky’s industry partners, Vecta Oil & Gas, has indicated in the past that it’s is interested in reproducing injection work in order to do its own EOR testing in the future.

McGrail said that even if work cannot continue in the basalt formation, the research could have far-reaching effects given that basalt is found around the world, perhaps most notably in India. Since the subcontinent has limited conventional CO2 storage potential and a rapidly growing power sector, basalt storage could be particularly ideal if the country ever looks to deploy CCS, he said. “Having us get to the point of injection is a real incentive for maybe a country like India to start looking seriously at pursuing a similar pilot project,” McGrail said. Big Sky’s project is the second to test CO2 injection into basalts. A $10 million project in Iceland called CarbFix injected 2,000 tonnes of CO2 into a basalt formation there last year with financial help from the utility Reykjavik Energy and the Icelandic, U.S. and French governments.