Underground carbon storage project takes root
Virginia Tech is serving as the technical lead of the U.S. Department of Energy-funded project that aims to store more than 1.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year and reduce the risk and costs of future projects.
For six years, Uzezi Orivri was a petroleum engineer, focused on extracting oil and gas from the ground.
Now, as a part of a U.S. Department of Energy-funded project, the former petroleum engineer is helping revolutionize efforts to keep harmful amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere by putting it in the ground.
“Carbon sequestration was something I really wanted to do my Ph.D. research on,” said Orivri, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering. “My work experience as a petroleum engineer highlighted the necessity of reducing carbon emissions while simultaneously increasing energy accessibility. This project really aligns well with my research objectives.”
Recently announced by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management and administered by the National Energy Technology Lab under federal award number DE-FE0032447, the Atlantic Coast CO2 Emissions Storage Sink, commonly referred to as Project ACCESS, is a CarbonSAFE Phase II feasibility study in South Florida that will evaluate the potential for safe and permanent geological carbon dioxide storage at depths exceeding 7,500 feet below the Earth’s surface. Overseen by the Southern States Energy Board with Virginia Tech serving as the technical lead, Project ACCESS aims to store more than 1.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year and reduce the risk and costs of future projects.
“With many industrial emitters and a limited history exploring carbon dioxide capture, utilization, and storage opportunities, Project ACCESS represents an initial step toward understanding the opportunities and challenges associated with commercial deployment in South Florida,” said Ben Wernette, principal scientist and strategic partnerships lead for Southern States Energy Board. “Virginia Tech is responsible for the design and oversight of the surface characterization program, including all field data acquisition programs and modeling efforts.”
Orivri is a part of the Virginia Tech team, which is led by Ryan Pollyea, associate professor in the Department of Geosciences. Pollyea’s research program works with industry partners to deploy geologic carbon storage while linking students with research partners to get real world experience through internships and career opportunities. His graduate students have taken internships at Chevron and Schlumberger-Doll Research Labs, and this past spring, Pollyea mentored a student team through the Society of Exploration Geophysicists’ EVOLVE Carbon Solutions Professional Program. As a result of their work, the student team was selected to host the society's first virtual U.S. regional geoscience trivia contest.
“We’re working to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and doing it in a way that’s economically, technically, and scientifically sound,” Pollyea said. “Our research aims to put carbon dioxide permanently underground, while also developing long-term plans to monitor and verify that the carbon dioxide is stored securely.”
The Virginia Tech Project ACCESS team also includes
- Steve Holbrook, professor, Department of Geosciences
- Nino Ripepi, associate professor, Department of Mining and Mineral Engineering
- Rohit Pandey, assistant professor, Department of Mining and Minerals Engineering
- Piyali Chanda, research associate, Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Resources
“Our hope is to use projects like this one, working hand-in-hand with industry, to create an enabling environment for decarbonization technologies. This effort builds on significant momentum and we are looking forward to using it as a launchpad for others,” Pollyea said.
Each year, the typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency. Based on those numbers, if Project ACCESS develops, it could eliminate the annual carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 370,000 passenger vehicles.
Pollyea began studying geologic carbon sequestration in 2007. He said the technology is especially applicable to industries that have extreme difficulty lowering their greenhouse emissions, such as steel and cement production. By successfully retrofitting production plants with carbon capture technology, the emissions could be contained and injected into deep geological formations, allowing those industries to greatly reduce their carbon footprint without sacrificing production.
The end result of this process would deposit and trap carbon dioxide in many of the same types of geological formations that hold other resources, such as oil and gas, thousands of feet below drinking water reservoirs.
“If your deepest water well is 1,000 feet underground, we’re going a mile or more deeper that,” Pollyea said.
Not only will Project ACCESS help industrial sectors with hard-to-reduce carbon dioxide emissions, it will do so by storing the emissions in the challenging types of rocks many previous efforts have avoided.
“We’re looking at geology that is not the thick, porous sandstone that is a more common target for geologic carbon dioxide storage,” Pollyea said. “Project ACCESS is targeting limestone formations in South Florida, and we’ve also been working to unlock carbon dioxide storage in Appalachian-style fold-and-thrust belts. This is new geology for carbon dioxide storage. This is the hard stuff, but unlocking new geology means that carbon dioxide storage can be deployed in more places, and with fewer pipelines transporting carbon dioxide from industrial facilities to storage sites. That giving more options for a broad range of emitters”
Pollyea said by expanding to different types of rocks there is potential for economic benefits to regions of the country previously hurt by declining industries, such as coal in Appalachia. Part of these benefits could come in the form of repurposing and building on the workforce’s existing skill set for the accompanying employee opportunities.
The opportunity to contribute to such innovative work alongside Pollyea is what drew Orivri to Virginia Tech after working for six years in the oil and gas industries.
“There really are not a lot of projects globally doing this with carbonates,” Orivri said. “And there’s a lot of academic research and microscopic stuff that goes into it, but he [Pollyea] was focused on project execution in very practical terms – how do we get this thing working. How do we get carbon dioxide in the ground.”
Having arrived at Virginia Tech last fall, Orivri said the work had already taught him a lot about the value of working with a variety of partners.
“To make a project like this work, you need a lot of collaboration with people like government agencies and industry partners, not just academia,” Orivri said.
He said the project had also illuminated the importance of having the type of interdisciplinary research team Virginia Tech had drawn together.
“My main challenge right now is that I’m not a geologist, I’m an engineer,” Orivri said. “So I need folks like Lars [Koehn, a Ph.D. candidate in geosciences] who is a geologist and geochemist to help me have a proper understanding of the geological model to make the engineering work.”
That combination of academic expertise, alongside the support and know-how of industry and government partners, has created a situation with a high upside for the work below the surface of the Earth.
“If we can get this to work, we can unlock a lot of real estate for carbon storage and take a critical step towards Virginia Tech becoming a destination for the kind of interdisciplinary research, innovation, and talent development needed to advance the control of carbon emissions,” Pollyea said.
