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As part of the Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Pre-Feasibility phase of the Carbon Storage Assurance Facility Enterprise (CarbonSAFE) Initiative, the University of Illinois and Illinois State Geological Survey will conduct a pre-feasibility assessment for commercial-scale CO2 geological storage complexes in the East sub-basin of the Illinois Basin, with a view toward identifying sites capable of storing more than 50 million metric tons of CO2 from one or more industrial sources. A CCS coordination team will develop a plan and strategy to address the technical and non-technical challenges to enable an economically feasible and publicly acceptable integrated CCS project. A significant output will be a high-level technical evaluation of the East Sub-Basin that will include detailed subsurface characterization and risk identification, along with evaluation of potential industrial CO2 sources for sequestration, to identify suitable storage sites within the complexes.
Identifying geological storage sites suitable for storage of over 50 million tonnes of CO2 is essential for developing commercial-scale CCS projects to address greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources. There are relatively few large carbon storage projects in deep saline reservoirs, and this gap in development knowledge will be addressed by the research in the project. This work will address improving storage capacity estimates to attain an industry standard of ±30 percent or better for investment decisions. The data from this study will be used within the NRAP Toolkits to move toward validating technologies to ensure storage permanence and to improve reservoir storage efficiency. The knowledge gained will contribute to best practice manuals about CCS technology and issues that will be of broad use to other sites and future commercialization efforts.