The MRCSP is a multi-year research program led by Battelle with a mission to identify, test and further develop the most effective approaches to carbon dioxide (CO2) utilization and storage in nine states within the Midwest and Northeast.

“This project will explore what CO2 is doing in the deep underground, its migration and reactions,” said Neeraj Gupta, senior research leader in Battelle’s Energy & Environment business unit. “We’re not only looking at storage, but we’re also figuring out how to utilize CO2 before it’s stored.”  

Established 10 years ago by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), the MRCSP is one of seven Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships in the U.S. This project will build on the work completed by MRCSP’s industry and research members during earlier phases of the program, which included smaller-scale testing and mapping of geologic formation across the region. 

The current project in Michigan is designed to inject and monitor at least 1 million metric tons of CO2 into a series of oil fields in different stages of their production life-cycles. The first test in the series will inject up to 500,000 metric tons of CO2 into a depressurized, late-stage oil field that has undergone primary production and enhanced oil recovery for several years and is now near the end of its productive life. 

The MRCSP team instrumented the wells and pipelines to obtain geological and operational data that will be used to evaluate monitoring technologies, validate reservoir simulation models, and provide material balances on the enhanced oil recovery (EOR) operations to determine how much CO2 is retained in the formations.

Source: Carbon Capture Journal, 29 Nov 2013