Advances and Challenges in Sub-Seafloor CO₂ Storage

Dear Colleagues,

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) can mitigate climate change and contribute to keeping the planet below the global target of less than 2 °C warming before 2100, relative to pre-industrial times. To reach this target, we need to boost CCUS technology to increase the CO₂ storage capacity from the current million ton per year scale to the gigatonne scale. Geological CO₂ storage is currently the most feasible and effective approach to store large amounts of CO₂ over a geological time scale. The challenge ahead is then to find safe and efficient sub-seafloor storage solutions to accommodate this three order of magnitude increase in storage capacity, and to maximize the quantitative information we can get from remote geophysical data at different time and spatial scales.

Currently, sub-seafloor storage of CO₂ is generally done in a supercritical phase (above 304.23 K and 7.38 MPa) but storing CO₂ in a liquid phase and/or in hydrate are attractive alternatives. From a monitoring viewpoint, we have yet to develop the full potential of quantitatively relating induced seismicity or geophysical changes in the reservoir, caprock, or overburden to geomechanical changes during injection. In terms of CO₂ leakage, there is still a limited quantitative understanding of the risk posed to the storage integrity of the reservoir by high permeability sub-vertical structures, such as pre-existing faults and/or induced fractures.

This Special Issue 'Advances and Challenges in Sub-Seafloor CO₂ Storage' of Energies is seeking innovative, informative, and multi-disciplinary research contributions in the broad topic of sub-seafloor CO₂ storage including but not limited to the following:

• Thermo-hydro-mechano-chemical coupled processes
• Thermal loading in the reservoir and caprock
• CO₂ leakage pathways
• Spatial scale-dependent processes – near well vs far well changes
• Time-lapse monitoring from remote geophysical data
• Induced seismicity and geophysical data relation to geomechanical changes
• CO₂ storage in a liquid phase and in hydrate
• Laboratory and field to micro-scale numerical modeling studies
• Comprehensive case studies on active and potential CO₂ storage reservoirs

Feel free to contact the Guest Editors with a title and brief outline of your paper content, to assess whether it would fit within the scope of this Special Issue.

Dr. Hector Marin Moreno
Dr. Joonsang Park
Guest Editors

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• Sub-seafloor CO₂ storage
• Multiphase fluid flow
• CO₂ hydrate
• Thermo-hydro-mechano-chemical (THMC) processes
• Thermal loading
• Induced-seismicity
• Geomechanics
• Quantitative geophysics
• Time-lapse monitoring
• Numerical modeling
• Laboratory characterization
• Field cases