Skip to main content

PNNL

  • About
  • News & Media
  • Careers
  • Events
  • Research
    • Scientific Discovery
      • Biology
        • Computational Biology
        • Ecosystem Science
        • Human Health
          • Cancer Biology
          • Metabolic Inflammatory Diseases
        • Integrative Omics
          • Advanced Metabolomics
          • Chemical Biology
          • Mass Spectrometry-Based Measurement Technologies
          • Spatial and Single-Cell Proteomics
        • Microbiome Science
          • Biofuels & Bioproducts
          • Human Microbiome
          • Soil Microbiome
      • Chemistry
        • Catalysis
        • Chemical Physics
      • Earth & Coastal Sciences
        • Atmospheric Science
          • Atmospheric Aerosols
          • Human-Earth System Interactions
          • Modeling Earth Systems
        • Coastal Science
        • Ecosystem Science
        • Plant Science
        • Subsurface Science
        • Terrestrial Aquatics
      • Materials Sciences
        • Solid Phase Processing
        • Science of Interfaces
        • Precision Materials by Design
        • Materials in Extreme Environments
      • Nuclear & Particle Physics
        • Dark Matter
        • Neutrino Physics
        • Flavor Physics
        • Fusion Energy Science
      • Quantum Information Sciences
    • Sustainable Energy
      • Electric Grid Modernization
        • Building and Grid Modeling
          • Building and Grid Modeling Tools and Capabilities
        • Distribution
        • Emergency Response
        • Grid Cybersecurity
        • Grid Analytics
          • AGM Program
          • Tools and Capabilities
        • Grid Architecture
        • Grid Energy Storage
        • Transmission
      • Energy Efficiency
        • Building and Grid Modeling
        • Building Technologies
          • Advanced Building Controls
          • Building-Grid Integration
          • Advanced Lighting
        • Residential Buildings
          • Energy Efficient Technology Integration
          • Home Energy Score
          • Building America Solution Center
        • Commercial Buildings
        • Federal Buildings
          • Federal Performance Optimization
          • Resilience and Security
        • Building Energy Codes
        • Appliance and Equipment Standards
      • Energy Storage
        • Chemical Energy Storage
        • Electrochemical Energy Storage
        • Flexible Loads and Generation
        • Grid Integration, Controls, and Architecture
        • Regulation, Policy, and Valuation
        • Science Supporting Energy Storage
      • Environmental Management
        • Environmental Remediation
        • Waste Processing
        • Radiation Measurement
      • Fossil Energy
        • Carbon Management
          • Carbon Capture
          • Carbon Storage
          • Carbon Utilization
        • Subsurface Energy Systems
        • Advanced Hydrocarbon Conversion
      • Nuclear Energy
        • Reactor Licensing
        • Reactor Operations
        • Fuel Cycle Research
        • Advanced Reactors
      • Renewable Energy
        • Grid Integration of Renewable Energy
        • Hydropower
          • Environmental Performance of Hydropower
          • Hydropower and the Electric Grid
          • Hydropower Cybersecurity and Digitalization
          • Materials Science for Hydropower
          • Pumped Storage Hydropower
          • Water + Hydropower Planning
        • Marine Energy
          • Environmental Monitoring for Marine Energy
          • Marine Biofouling and Corrosion
          • Marine Energy Resource Characterization
          • Testing for Marine Energy
          • The Blue Economy
        • Wind Energy
          • Distributed Wind
          • Offshore Wind
          • Uncertainty Quantification
          • Wildlife and Wind
          • Wind Data Archive and Portal
          • Wind Resource Characterization
        • Geothermal Energy
        • Solar Energy
        • Energy Equity & Health
      • Transportation
        • Vehicle Technologies
          • Emission Control
          • Energy-Efficient Mobility Systems
          • Lightweight Materials
          • Vehicle Electrification
        • Bioenergy Technologies
          • Algal Biofuels
          • Aviation Biofuels
          • Waste-to-Energy and Products
        • Hydrogen & Fuel Cells
    • National Security
      • Chemical & Biothreat Signatures
        • Contraband Detection
        • Explosives Detection
        • Pathogen Science & Detection
          • Threat-Agnostic Biodefense
      • Cybersecurity
        • Discovery and Insight
        • Proactive Defense
        • Trusted Systems
      • Nuclear Material Science
      • Nuclear Nonproliferation
        • Nuclear Explosion Monitoring
        • Nuclear Forensics
        • Radiological & Nuclear Detection
        • Ultra-Sensitive Nuclear Measurements
      • Stakeholder Engagement
        • Disaster Recovery
        • Global Collaborations
        • Legislative and Regulatory Analysis
        • Technical Training
      • Systems Integration & Deployment
        • Additive Manufacturing
        • Deployed Technologies
        • Rapid Prototyping
        • Systems Engineering
      • Threat Analysis
        • Advanced Wireless Security
          • 5G Security
          • RF Signal Detection & Exploitation
        • Climate Security
        • Internet of Things
    • Data Science & Computing
      • Artificial Intelligence
      • Graph and Data Analytics
      • High-Performance Computing
      • Software Engineering
      • Visual Analytics
      • Computational Mathematics & Statistics
    • Lab Objectives
    • Publications & Reports
    • Featured Research
    • Computing & Analytics
  • People
    • Inventors
    • Diversity
    • Lab Leadership
    • Lab Fellows
    • Staff Accomplishments
  • Partner with PNNL
    • Academia
      • Distinguished Graduate Research Programs
      • Internships
      • Visiting Faculty Program
      • Joint Appointments
      • Joint Institutes
      • Linus Pauling Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship
    • Community
      • STEM Education
        • Resources
        • Student STEM Ambassadors
        • STEM Ambassadors in the Classroom
      • Philanthropy
      • Volunteering
      • Economic Impact
    • Industry
      • Available Technologies
      • Industry
      • Industry Partnerships
      • Licensing & Technology Transfer
      • Entrepreneurial Leave
  • Facilities & Centers
    • All Facilities
      • Atmospheric Radiation Measurement User Facility
      • Electricity Infrastructure Operations Center
      • Energy Sciences Center
      • Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory
      • Grid Storage Launchpad
      • Institute for Integrated Catalysis
      • Interdiction Technology and Integration Laboratory
      • Radiochemical Processing Laboratory
      • PNNL Seattle Research Center
      • PNNL-Sequim
      • Shallow Underground Laboratory

Breadcrumb

  1. Research
  2. Sustainable Energy
  3. Fossil Energy
  4. Carbon Management
  5. Carbon Storage

Carbon Storage

Supporting commercial-scale geologic storage
in mineralization- and buoyancy-dominated reservoirs

  • Carbon Management
    • Carbon Capture
    • Carbon Storage
    • Carbon Utilization
  • Subsurface Energy Systems
  • Advanced Hydrocarbon Conversion
  • News & Updates
  • Attend a Carbon Storage Event
  • Publications
  • Projects

PNNL has led research in applied subsurface science for over 50 years. Leveraging this diverse background, we support the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (DOE-FECM) Carbon Storage program with deep domain expertise and broad computational capabilities.

cylinder
PNNL conducted the first injection of supercritical CO2 into a basalt reservoir. Data and samples taken from the Wallula, Washington, site two years later confirmed that the basalts converted CO2 into minerals much more rapidly than other storage formations, offering the potential to store CO2 in a solid form that is immobile and poses no risk of leakage. Nathan Johnson | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Tools for real-time CO2 storage management

To help accelerate commercial-scale deployment of geologic CO2 storage, our scientists are working to deliver solutions for real-time imaging of the subsurface by bringing together domain experts in geophysics, geochemistry, data science, and high-performance computing. PNNL’s R&D 100-winning E4D-RT technology provides subsurface project real-time feedback on the fate of fluid injected into the subsurface.

Under the Carbon Storage program, we are working to extend these capabilities to the deep subsurface using multiphysics joint inversion tools. This ability to rapidly acquire, process, and develop insights from monitoring data yields unprecedented tools for field operators, offering both real-time imaging of the subsurface and improved reliability of reservoir forecasting. In the CO2 storage world, this is a step change similar to the difference between anticipating the weather by looking at the horizon or looking at a predictive multimodel forecast.

twinsisters
PNNL researchers are exploring how injecting carbon dioxide into basalts is turning the fluid into a solid. Photo by Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

CO2 mineralization storage

Project risks associated with long-term CO2 storage site stewardship present a barrier to investment in commercial-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in the United States. This is because a large fraction of the CO2 injected into conventional sedimentary storage reservoirs remains mobile over long time frames. Work pioneered at PNNL has demonstrated the potential for rapid CO2 mineralization in basalt reservoirs, the dominant geology in the inland Pacific Northwest, India, and other environments including deep offshore regimes.

Instead of waiting hundreds or thousands of years for CO2 to mineralize, the Wallula injection project—the first to demonstrate supercritical CO2 injection into basalts—confirmed that the majority of CO2 had been transformed to carbonate minerals in just under two years.

With our experience siting and characterizing projects, including developing the first Class VI permit ever granted (FutureGen 2.0), PNNL is focused on transforming fundamental and laboratory science into meaningful solutions to real-world challenges facing CO2 storage field operators.

Carbon Sequestration or storing carbon dioxide underground may be one approach to reducing atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas. Storing it in basalt formations creates a chemical reaction in which the CO2 is transformed into a mineral similar to limestone enabling permanent storage underground. A field study by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory shows that chemical happens quickly. Within two years, CO2 injected underground in Washington state had converted to the carbonate mineral ankerite.

CO2 storage siting and permitting

Over the last two decades, PNNL has been a major actor of several initiatives led by DOE-FE aimed to accelerate the development of CCS. PNNL served as the subsurface lead for DOE-FECM’s FutureGen 2.0 Project, and in this capacity, secured the first-ever Class VI Underground Injection Control permits issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Since 2011, PNNL has been actively engaged in the National Risk Assessment Partnership (NRAP), which is focused on the development of science-based methodologies and platforms for quantifying risks amid system uncertainty and to better inform decision-making for carbon storage sites. 

Regional carbon storage initiatives

The ADM Decatur CO2 injection project in the United States and the Boundary Dam project in Canada have helped regulatory and industrial stakeholders frame the institutional and policy structures needed to support commercial-scale CCS deployment. These early projects have resulted in the build-out of Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership demonstrations and CarbonSAFE projects to qualify these basins for commercial-scale storage.

Wallulaplant
PNNL conducted the first injection of supercritical CO2 into a basalt reservoir. Data and samples taken from the Wallula, Washington, site two years later confirmed that the basalts converted CO2 into minerals much more rapidly than other storage formations, offering the potential to store CO2 in a solid form that is immobile and poses no risk of leakage. Stock photo.

CarbonSAFE

PNNL is supporting multiple CarbonSAFE projects across the United States, both on-shore and off-shore. Researchers at PNNL also provide expertise in site screening, CO2 transport evaluation, multiphase flow simulation, and risk assessment. PNNL remains one of the rare institutions with such extensive experience in all aspects of a CCS project, from technical expertise to programmatic regulatory understanding, and from site selection to site permitting.

NRAP

At the same time, programs like NRAP have given developers and regulators tools for quantifying and mitigating risk in subsurface CO2 storage projects. PNNL developed the NRAP State of Stress Analysis Tool (SOSAT) so operators can make operational decisions related to geomechanical risks during the carbon storage site screening and characterization phases. SOSAT also quantifies the current state of stress and how a state of stress changes as the result of subsurface fluid injections.

SMART

Leveraging the data and insights gained from these efforts, DOE’s CO2 Storage program has extensively scoped and demonstrated the multi-institution Science-informed Machine Learning for Accelerating Real-Time Decisions in Subsurface Applications (SMART) Initiative to develop tools for operators of commercial-scale storage projects.

The SMART Initiative aims to leverage recent advances in science-based machine learning to significantly improve the efficiency and effectiveness of commercial-scale geological carbon storage. As a part of this initiative, PNNL is co-leading efforts to improve real-time forecasting and history matching during storage site operation, contributing to the development of fast-forward models for a virtual learning environment for site operation, as well as physics-informed machine learning for stress estimation and induced seismicity mitigation.

Contacts

Casie Davidson
Manager, Carbon Management and Fossil Energy Market Sector
casie.davidson@pnnl.gov
509-372-6259
Todd Schaef
Subsector Manager, Subsurface Energy Systems
todd.schaef@pnnl.gov
509-371-7102

PNNL

  • Get in Touch
    • Contact
    • Careers
    • Doing Business
    • Environmental Reports
    • Security & Privacy
    • Vulnerability Disclosure Program
  • Research
    • Scientific Discovery
    • Sustainable Energy
    • National Security
Subscribe to PNNL News
Department of Energy Logo Battelle Logo
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is managed and operated by Battelle for the Department of Energy
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn