Dr. Ian Duncan, Bureau of Economic Geology, University of Texas at Austin
Abstract: Assessing Risks for Carbon Capture and Storage Risk assessments of geologic sequestration projects are needed to facilitate more robust and transparent business and regulatory decisions. All large industrial projects bring with them operational risks. These risks for CCS projects include: (1) the risks of capturing, compressing, and transporting CO2; (2) the risk of blowouts or very rapid CO2 release from wells or faults; (3) the risks that leakage from the containment zone will contaminate drinking water or energy resources (as well as environmental and ecosystem impacts); (4) risks that projects will not be able to inject at contracted rates (or that injection rates will decrease over time) and (5) That sequestered CO2 (and possibly associated methane gas) will leak into the atmosphere reversing the climate change benefits of sequestration and perhaps requiring repayment of CO2 sequestration credits. Information from the experiences of the CO2 EOR industry can inform some of these issues and provide a quantitative basis for risk projections.