Abstract
Lawrence H. Wickstrom1, James McDonald2, Ronald A. Riley2, Timothy R. Carr3, Brandon Nuttall4, John A. Rupp5, Wilfrido Solano-Acosta5, Charles W. Zuppann5, and Beverly Seyler6
(1) Ohio Division of Geological Survey, 4383 Fountain Sq. Dr, Columbus, OH 43224, phone: 614-265-6598, larry.wickstrom@dnr.state.oh.us, (2) Ohio Division of Geological Survey, 4383 Fountain Square Drive, Columbus, OH 43224, (3) Kansas Geological Survey, University of Kansas, 1930 Constant Ave, Lawrence, KS 66047, (4) Kentucky Geological Survey, 228 MMRB, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0107, (5) Indiana Geological Survey, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, (6) Illinois State Geological Survey, 615 East Peabody Drive, Champaign, IL 61820
Heretofore, a lack of economic sources of CO2 has precluded its use for enhanced oil and gas recovery in many areas of the country. If flue-gas separation technologies advance sufficiently to make economical sources of CO2 widely available, injection of CO2 for enhanced recovery may become more widespread, and make it one of the most attractive options under consideration for CO2 sequestration. As part of the USDOE-funded Midcontinent Interactive Digital Carbon Atlas and Relational Database (MIDCARB) project, detailed information is being gathered and analyzed for five states’ oil and gas fields. Using GIS technology, field data is combined with data on CO2-source locations and characteristics to evaluate candidate fields/pools for CO2-driven enhanced recovery operations, or simply for storage of CO2 in abandoned reservoirs. Source output can be compared to field injection capacity, and future enhancements will allow economic calculations to be applied to specific source/reservoir pairs.
MIDCARB is a distributed database system that contains both detailed and regional geologic and reservoir properties for prospective sequestration reservoirs in the five participant states. One aim of MIDCARB is to augment the current general inventory of geologic sequestration capacity in the United States with detailed regional and local capacity assessments. Data and information on prospective sequestration sources and sinks is provided from multiple servers and databases and provided seamlessly on the user's desktop via the Internet. The distributed approach of the MIDCARB system provides a model to simplify construction of a national geologic sequestration database.