Meeting Details
Abstract Submittal
Please send an abstract of up to four pages including figures and tables, along with your abstract cover sheet, by e-mail to Debbi Boonstra (debbi @aapg.org) at AAPG before April 15, 2009.
Extended abstracts or full papers are expected to be received before or during the meeting. People who commit to submitting an extended abstract or a full paper will increase their chances of being invited to present.
Format
This will be a three-day meeting with single-session oral and poster presentations. The emphasis will be on invited speakers, and limited oral presentations. Oral papers are aimed to be “overviews” with most of the detailed papers presented as posters. This format is intended to optimize discussion. Keynote talks will be held each morning, and posters will be presented in the early afternoon, followed by another oral session before dinner. Informal “break-out” sessions of smaller groups to address specific topics will be held in the evenings, with outcomes of each break-out summarized the following morning.
Conference Goals
The main purpose of this conference is to bring together leading global experts from industry, academia, and government to encourage the exchange of ideas and enhance cooperation on geological sequestration of carbon dioxide. The desired outcome from this conference is to improve the ability to predict and verify the fate of injected CO2 in the subsurface, including plume evolution and leakage risk. This conference is a natural follow-up to a well attended carbon sequestration initiatives in all three technical societies, including a short course taught in San Antonio during the annual AAPG meeting in 2008. The goal is to have a combined AAPG, SPE, and SEG research workshop where the significant issues in geological sequestration are discussed in a cross-disciplinary format to develop the best methods for static and dynamic characterization, modeling, monitoring and verification of CO2 movement in the subsurface.
This Hedberg research conference will integrate field-test results from CO2 sequestration pilot projects with ongoing research at groups such as IEA GHG, National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), CSLF and others. The goals of the conference are to identify research gaps and to propose methodologies to bridge those gaps to develop best practices for geological sequestration of CO2 on commercial scales.
Topics
Talks and Papers are being solicited for the following Sessions:
- Prediction
- Site Selection / Characterization
- What is required to assure injectivity and once injected, containment of CO2?
- How to assess/address the natural variability in geological, engineering and economic complexity at any potential CO2 storage site?
- Is there a “best practice” workflow that can be applied to site evaluations?
- Site-specific flow simulations
- How do we predict where the plume will travel and how fast it will travel?
- How detailed does the reservoir characterization need to be in order for the simulation to produce reliable predictions?
- How well are various monitoring and verification techniques likely to work at the site?
- Large scale simulations
- How do multiple sequestration sites interact with each other and what is the effect of well penetrations through the target reservoir?
- What effects might pressure changes caused by injection of CO2 have on potable aquifers or on reservoir and seal integrity?
- Understanding the geochemistry
- What rock-water-CO2 chemical reactions occur within the reservoir and at the seal boundary, at various time scales? How fast are these reactions and what are their impacts on sequestration?
- Monitoring and Verification
- Seismic
- What type of seismic techniques (3D, time-lapse 4D, borehole, multi-component, passive micro-seismic, etc.) are useful, and how so, for monitoring and verifying CO2 sequestration?
- What are the limitations of different seismic methods, including constraints on data collection in urban, rural and offshore areas, cost, density of coverage, resolution, noise, repeat timing intervals, ability to quantify CO2 estimates, etc?
- What are the pros and cons of non-seismic verification methodologies:
- Gravity?
- Electromagnetic?
- Geodetic (InSAR, GPS, tiltmeter, etc.)?
- Geochmistry
- Groundwater?
- Atmospheric?
- In-situ sampling (eg. Monitoring wells)?
- Unifying themes
- Workflows and Case Studies
- How can different methods be used in prediction and verification of CO2 plume movement?
- Risk and uncertainty assessment
- What are the risks associated with the injection and containment of CO2 in the subsurface?
- What are the various potential leakage pathways constituting containment risk?
- What are the methods to assess those risks (qualitative and quantitative)?
- What are the potential risk mitigation options?
- Can safety and environmental concerns of community and stakeholders be managed?
- What risk strategies need to be in place for potential regulatory requirements?
Additional Information
The SEG is planning to organize/coordinate a companion summer research workshop (SRW), to be held the week immediately following the Hedberg, to focus on detailed Geophysical aspects of CO2 sequestration, including field trips to the Columbia Ice Field glaciers and the Tyrrell Dinosaur Museum of the Alberta Badlands (tentative SRW dates Sunday-Thursday, Aug 23-27, in the Canadian Rockies - final details TBA.)