Welcome to the PROTECT project, a CLIMIT project (2014-2018) funded by the Research Council of Norway, TOTAL, and the SUCCESS industry consortium: Statoil, RWE DEA Norge, ConocoPhilips, CGG Veritas, and Lundin. The project consortium involves five leading Norwegian research and academic institutions in carbon storage: Uni Research CIPR (project lead), Institute for Energy Technology, Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, University of Bergen, and University of Oslo.
Since April 2014, the PROTECT team has sought to better understand the ability of the caprock to safely and effectively contain CO2 in large, industrial-scale storage projects. The project will study typical storage environments in the North Sea that have large storage capacity for injected CO2. The project addresses concerns that injection rates of tens of millions tons per year can overpressurize the storage complex, inducing damaging stress on the caprock and causing unwanted leakage.
The PROTECT project emphasizes the integration of data acquisition, laboratory experiments and computational studies to advance new knowledge in our understanding of caprock integrity.
Project News
The project was completed on 31 September 2018. The PROTECT final report (85 downloads ) has now been submitted to the Research Council. The project was an enormous success. The large volume of publications include: 25 peer-reviewed articles, 10 conference papers and extended abstracts, >24 presentations at conferences, 4 technical reports, 2 PhD theses, and 2 Master theses. Technological infrastructure developed in the project includes: shear box test methodology and 7 advanced simulation codes.
The PROTECT project is drawing to a close. A project summary with recommendations for future research in caprock integrity has been submitted to the upcoming GHGT-14 conference in Melbourne, Australia. The paper can be downloaded here: Gasda et al. (2018) Protection of Caprock Integrity for Large-Scale CO2 Storage (87 downloads ) , GHGT-14.
The project hosted a Seal Integrity Workshop on 4-5 April in Geilo, Norway. Participants discussed the status of research in seal integrity, identified the key challenges, and compiled recommendations for future research directions. The report of the workshop will be published here.
Project member Professor Jan Nordbotten was interviewed in June 2018 by Sysla about the changing political climate for CCS in Norway:
The PROTECT project was featured in the 2017 annual report for CLIMIT, which is published in english and norsk.
Project leader Sarah Gasda was interviewed about the potential for large-scale CO2 storage in April 2018 by the online magazine Energi og Klima.
PhD student Wietse Boon successfully defended his dissertation titled “Conforming Discretizations of Mixed-Dimensional Partial Differential Equations” on June 1, 2018. Congratulations to Wietse and best of luck in your future career!
New results of model comparison for large-scale pressure and deformation in the southern Utsira can be found in WP4 results and in the presentation given at the Interpore Conference in Rotterdam: Model comparison for geomechanical simulation of large-scale CO2 storage (158 downloads )
The project leader Sarah Gasda was invited to give a talk about the project at the recent CLIMIT Summit held on 7-8 March 2017 at the Soria Moria Hotel, Oslo. The talk can be found here: Keeping CO2 safely stored (176 downloads )
Recent project results are now being synthesized for each work package. This is a work in progress, so please check back!
Research Partners:
Funding partners: