CO2 transport, storage and monitoring for CCS application: Latest R&D progress in Republic of Korea

Abstract

Marine geological storage of CO2 is to capture CO2 from major point sources, to transport to the storage sites and to store CO2 into the marine geological structure such as offshore saline aquifer. In onshore and offshore pipeline transport design, it is necessary to consider not only delivery performance but also safety issues. Among them, CO2 purity issue can be a big problem because small amount of impurities make it possible to severe change thermodynamic properties of the CO2 stream and then affect downstream processes such as transport, injection and storage. In this study, the effect of nitrogen impurity on the CO2 pipeline transport process was studied with experimental method. As N2 impurity increases the CO2-N2 mixture shows different flow patterns and pressure drop behavior. To assure that there is no leakage of stored CO2, it is necessary to monitor the subsurface CO2 behavior. In this paper, numerical simulation model was developed to detect the spatial distribution and behavior of subsurface CO2 by analyzing the seismic wave propagation characteristics.