Reporting on the Flow and Transport for CO₂ Storage Meeting

Written by Kazeem Rabiu, an Early Career Researchers at Loughborough University, United Kingdom, that was granted funding by the UKCCSRC’s ECR Meeting fund to attend the meeting.

The flow and transport for CO₂ storage meeting was organised by UKCCSRC, and took place at Imperial College London between 29th October and 30th October 2015. More than 50 participants from various organisations in the UK and USA were present at the meeting. Some of the attending organisations were; Imperial College London, Cranfield University, Cambridge University, UKCCSRC, Statoil, British Geological Survey, BP Group Technology, University of Edinburgh, University of Texas at Austin, LR-Senergy, University of Oxford, Petro-vision, University of Manchester, Loughborough University, Coventry University, Shell and City University.

The meeting started at around 1:00pm on 29th October with an introduction by Catriona Reynolds. The first speaker was Martin Blunt, a professor of petroleum engineering from Imperial College whose discussion was on the pore- scale dynamics and the interpretation of flow processes. Follows this discussion was Tony Espie who shed more light on the challenges in predicting the performance of storage system. Next, Andrew Cavanagh from statoil talked on the experience of Statoil storage based on 20 years and 20 million tonnes. Ongoing projects on CO₂ sequestration and monitoring techniques in Sleipner and Snohvits were fully discussed.

After the break session, Catriona Reynolds, a PhD student at Imperial College discussed characterising flow behaviour for gas injection based on relative permeability of CO₂-brine and nitrogen-water in heterogeneous rock. Some of the experimental procedures and modelling used in her PhD work were fully explained. The meeting on that day was concluded by Marc Hesse whose discussion was on the long-term safety of geological CO₂ storage and the lessons from Bravo dome natural CO₂ reservoir. Thereafter, evening reception poster session started and follows by dinner which took place at Med Kitchen, Gloucester road, London. All the participants who attended the dinner sat together and had group discussions about their work, it was really interesting to find out what other ECRs are working on.

On the following day, the meeting started by Jerome Neufeld whose lecture was on the monitoring and modelling the flow and dissolution of geologically stored CO₂. Also, Stuart Haszeldine had discussion on enhanced storage performance through CO₂-enhanced oil recovery. Next, Chris MacMinn explained the migration of CO₂ through layered sedimentary sequences. 

After the break session, Jeroen Snippe talked on multiphase flow modelling of calcite dissolution patterns from core scale to reservoir scale. The last lecture was delivered by Andy Chadwick whose discussion was musings on the properties of a mobile CO₂ layer flowing in porous sand based on the integrating monitoring and modelling. The meeting was closed by Sam Krevor. However, Catriona Reynolds took all early career researchers to her laboratory and explained all the equipment such as supercritical pump and X-ray computed tomography that is using for her Phd work before we finally departed to our various destinations.