Hydromechanical Challenges (and opportunities) during Geologic Carbon Storage

Carbon capture and storage remains an appealing option to help minimize global CO2 emissions. In the
past decade, a number of new demonstration- and commercial-scale projects have come online. While these
projects have been largely successful, they have faced their share of hurdles. This talk will present case studies
highlighting a few of these challenges, with a focus on the geomechanical behavior of the storage reservoir and
seals. Injecting fluid at relatively high pressure can create unwanted hazards, including the potential for hydraulic
fracturing, fault reactivation, and induced seismicity. I will provide a broad overview of our ongoing research
program at LLNL to address these hazards. A central goal of this research is to create a tighter integration
between monitoring tools, modeling and data analysis techniques, and adaptive field control.
In the second half of the talk, I will turn to modeling challenges, and discuss the design of coupled
reservoir/geomechanical simulators to take advantage of large high-performance computing resources. In
particular, the talk will describe a class of implicit solution algorithms that scales efficiently to thousands of
processors and billions of unknowns.
Joshua White is a research scientist in the Computational Geosciences Group at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory. He holds a B.S.E. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Princeton University, and a
M.S. and Ph.D. in CEE from Stanford University