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The project is an international collaboration which brings together Canada, the U.S., the European Community, and Japan, as well as numerous other industrial and government sponsors. The research program integrates studies with the $2 billion commercial EOR and storage operations of Cenovus Energy and Apache at the Weyburn and Midale oil fields in the Williston Basin, Saskatchewan. The project is being completed through several phases with an overall goal of enhancing the knowledge base and understanding of CO2 geologic storage conducted with Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) operations. CO2 EOR and storage operations are studied in the Weyburn and Midale oil fields to understand controlling conditions and processes such as site suitability, reservoir capacity, reactive transport, storage integrity, wellbore performance, risk assessment, and effective monitoring and validation techniques.
The Weyburn and Midale oil fields now contain well in excess of 25 million metric tons of injected, monitored and geologically stored anthropogenic CO2 from the Great Plains Synfuels plant in Beulah, North Dakota, making it the world’s largest existing CCS project. By the completion of the project, the Weyburn and Midale oil fields will have produced an expected 220 million barrels of incremental oil. Research efforts have included extensive geologic and geochemical characterization of the storage environment to allow comprehensive risk assessments; successful application of seismic surveys to map the distribution of injected CO2 within the storage reservoir; geochemical monitoring of CO2 behavior and micro-seismic monitoring of reservoir response to CO2 injection; and development of new tools to aid in the assessment of wellbore integrity. In summary, the CO2-EOR operations at the Weyburn and Midale oil fields and associated research have successfully demonstrated the safe operation and integrity of CCS at industrial scale.
