Another pressure plot without values on the Y-axis! That’s what I thought when watching Eirik Jenssen’s presentation at the Dig X Conference in Oslo yesterday. Eirik works as a Reservoir Engineer for the Northern Lights Joint Venture in Stavanger, which aims to inject up to 37.5 Mt of CO2 into a Lower Jurassic aquifer in the Troll area, Norwegian North Sea. I was surprised, because it was not the first time. The same happened during Michael Larsen’s talk about the Danish Nini West injection project in December in London. It made me think, there is something about pressures that is probably not being shared too easily.
However, back in December, when Michael was asked about these very pressures during the Q&A, he did disclose the numbers. This time though, when I asked Eirik after his talk, he said that he could not share this information with me. Why are pressure data so sensitive?
For injection of CO2 into a saline aquifer, which is the case in the Northern Lights project offshore Norway, pressure management is very important. It is the pressure build-up during CO2 injection that will ultimately determine how much of the liquid can be stored in the reservoir. As soon as the fracture pressure of the overlying sealing unit is reached, injection will need to stop. And probably a little earlier than that to build in a safety margin.
Northern Lights is also a vehicle with three major oil companies as partners, and there may well be slight differences in the approach taken by each company to arrive at the best pressure forecast.
Another factor is that the Northern Lights licence is adjacent to two carbon storage licences, one operated by Wintershall in the west and the other by Equinor to the east. It is therefore easy to see that the potential for pressure interference is a critical factor in case the same reservoir is being used for CO2 injection. As Northern Lights will be the first project to start injecting, the neighbours will surely watch that space with interest, hoping that there will not be a significant effect on the pressure space in their adjacent licence areas. And given that pressure dissipation will obviously not be nicely adhering to licence boundaries, and the fact that there are geological uncertainties around the sedimentary architecture of the Lower Jurassic Johanssen Fm reservoir, it is easy to see how pressure dissipation will be critical. Offset well control is not great in the area, because legacy exploration wells did not target this specific reservoir in the past.
But is the secrecy around pressures something that we just have to accept in the same way as there is competition between oil companies chasing for oil or gas? Is carbon storage on its way to become a lucrative business whereby competitive advantage is gained through not sharing data? I am not convinced of that yet. As many people have already said, carbon capture and storage is a waste disposal business. A business that can only work if the emitters of CO2 are taxed or fined to such an extent that it becomes more attractive to capture the gas and dispose of it. There is no other economic incentive to drive it, and there is a lot of government money involved in making it happen too. In that (Northern) light, I think a case should be made for making pressure data readily available for other projects to draw a learning from, also because carbon storage projects at scale are not really widespread yet.
