The ETI (Energy Technologies Institute) has launched a new project which will study the impact of removing brine from undersea stores which could be used to store carbon dioxide.
The project will be carried out by Heriot-Watt University with £200,000 worth of funding.
The higher education institution is a founder member of the SCCS (Scottish Carbon Capture & Storage) research partnership and Element Energy.
Meanwhile, T2 Petroleum and Durham University will also participate in the project.
Paul Winstanley, ETI CCS project manager, said:“Although the UK Government is no longer pursuing its CCS demonstration competition, ETI’s view remains that CCS offers long term the lowest cost solution to meeting the UK’s legally binding 2050 climate change targets.
“One of our roles at the ETI is to help build knowledge and understanding around the challenges and benefits of CCS to ensure there is a robust evidence base in place allowing decisions to be made.
“Without early demonstration of CCS the country is placing much greater reliance on its ability to rapidly deploy the other tools it has such as renewables, new nuclear, bioenergy, low carbon heating and efficiency measures, which could double the cost of meeting UK energy and climate change targets with substantial increases in system costs appearing from 2020 onwards.
“The work of this project should continue to demonstrate the role CCS should play in a long-term transition to a low carbon energy system.”
The project will build on earlier CCS research work and help develop understanding of the potential CO2 stores, such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs or saline aquifers, located beneath UK waters.
An earlier ETI CCS project led to the development of the UK’s principal storage screening database, CO2Stored, which estimates the capacity and injectivity for each of an identified 550 stores off the UK’s coast. As part of the analysis one of the assumptions was that brine was not produced from the reservoir store before, during or after CO2 injection.
However, if pressure builds within a store as a result of CO2 injection then brine can potentially be removed from the store through a purpose-built well or wells to depressurise it whilst still retaining the store’s operation and integrity.
The first stage of the project will examine any changes in injectivity and storage capacity as a result of producing brine, the additional cost of using brine wells as part of storage site operations and the potential for any savings.
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