Subsurface Storage

Global gas storage projects on the rise

There is a lot of discussion in Europe at the moment around low levels of its gas storage reserves as winter is now approaching. Will there be enough? According to some analysts, it will be tricky. Where is Europe gas…

Drilling a well to produce nuclear energy

The first time I heard about the company Deep Fission was through a conversation with an operations geologist. He had been working on the first well dedicated to the company’s project in Kansas, USA. It all sounded a bit odd…

Spindletop spin-off: Helium storage

Qatar, generally responsible for a third of global helium supply, has had to halt production because the Iran war prohibits export. Storing liquified helium gas at surface is not cost-effective; highly specialised, insulated tanks are needed, and even then, the…

Many CCS projects may falter quietly without the promised benefits

In a recent special issue of EAGE’s journal First Break, dedicated to underground storage, one finds the usual articles that one would expect for such a publication. But there happened to be one little outlier. Or maybe a slightly larger…

Exploring salt for hydrogen storage

Halite cores from one of the exploration wells drilled to evaluate the Zuidwending salt dome for hydrogen storage readiness. Photo: IOT Holland. Energy stock, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Dutch state-owned company Gasunie, is working on a project called…

Storing heat in basement rocks

“Having a look at our lineament map,” says Jon Engström from the Geological Survey of Finland, “that is the first thing you need to do when you’re planning a subsurface project in our country.” Jon is a structural ge­ologist who…

The CCS parallel universe

Sometimes, I cannot prevent the feeling that the CO2 storage business is not so much about putting CO2 in the ground, but rather to keep an en­tire academic research community, a conference industry, and a contingent of geoscientists in a…

Carbon capture and mineralisation pilots in the Middle East

44.01 named their company after the mass of the molecule that is central to their business: Carbon Dioxide. They use CO2 captured from indus­try or the atmosphere and dissolve it in water to create a carbonated in­jection fluid, a kind…

Diverting the flow: The hidden power of overburden barriers

Since Mark Lakos joined Rock Flow Dynamics (RFD) from Wintershall Dea a bit more than a year ago – a job that brought him to Russia and Egypt – he has been heavily involved with mod­elling of CO2 injection and migration…

Offshore Algarve Basin geological carbon storage potential

In the Algarve Basin, two late Mi­ocene plays have been identified southeast of the Faro Peninsula using high-quality seismic and bore­hole data (Figure 1). These comprise of high-porosity turbiditic sands of Tortonian and upper Messinian age, overlain by regionally extensive,…