Insights and Commentaries
Managing carbon geological storage and natural resources in sedimentary basins
17th March 2017
Topic(s): CO2 storage
To highlight the research and achievements of Australian researchers, the Global CCS Institute, together with Australian National Low Emissions Coal Research and Development (ANLEC R&D), will hold a series of webinars throughout 2017. Each webinar will highlight a specific ANLEC R&D research project and the relevant report found on the Institute’s website.
This is the eighth webinar of the series and will present on basin resource management and carbon storage. With the ongoing deployment of CCS facilities globally, the pore space - the voids in the rock deep in sedimentary basins – are now a commercial resource. This is a relatively new concept with only a few industries utilising that pore space to date.
This webinar presented a framework for the management of basin resources including carbon storage. Prospective sites for geological storage of carbon dioxide target largely sedimentary basins since these provide the most suitable geological settings for safe, long-term storage of greenhouse gases. Sedimentary basins can host different natural resources that may occur in isolated pockets, across widely dispersed regions, in multiple locations, within a single layer of strata or at various depths.
In Australia, the primary basin resources are groundwater, oil and gas, unconventional gas, coal and geothermal energy. Understanding the nature of how these resources are distributed in the subsurface is fundamental to managing basin resource development and carbon dioxide storage. Natural resources can overlap laterally or with depth and have been developed successfully for decades. Geological storage of carbon dioxide is another basin resource that must be considered in developing a basin-scale resource management system to ensure that multiple uses of the subsurface can sustainably and pragmatically co-exist.
This webinar was presented by Karsten Michael, Research Team Leader, CSIRO Energy.
Here is a recording of the webinar and a browsable version of the slides used in the presentation: