Reservoir simulation of the CO[formula omitted] storage potential for the depositional environments of West Siberia

Abstract

We evaluate the CO2 storage potential for the depositional environments of the West Siberian sedimentary basin. Particularly, we investigate the prospect of storing large volumes of CO2 in the alluvial fan, barrier island, deltaic, and fluvial environments. We employ several detailed 3-D models of petroleum reservoirs as proxies for the saline aquifers occurring in the basin under the listed environments. By simulating supercritical CO2 injection into several reservoir sectors, we compare the environments in terms of their prospects for the underground storage of CO2. We estimate the maximum capacity and storage potential for the entire sectors by considering them the resources licensed for an industrial-scale Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project. The scenarios with a single and multiple injection wells are assessed in the evaluation, which might be of interest for the elaboration of feasible regulations and policies in the area. We find out that the barrier island deposits are characterized by maximum potential, whereas the fluvial environments are the least suitable for deploying CCS. We demonstrate that for the barrier island environments, the storage potential is most sensitive to the relative permeability end-points. We also test several scaling concepts for extending our estimates for a single-well injection to a multi-well scenarios and generally from a site-specific to regional scale. We conclude that due to the interference between nearby wells, the storage potential for a single well scenario cannot reliably be scaled to the case of CO2 injection through a group of wells.