Fingerprinting industrial CO2 and testing noble gas and clumped isotope tracers and the Carbon Management Canada Field Research Station Enquiry

This project will generate new knowledge relevant to the worldwide problem of monitoring secure CO2 storage and identifying unplanned CO2 migration from an engineered storage site. It includes training in stable, clumped and noble gas isotope geochemical measurement techniques and undertake sampling and analysis of captured COifrom industrial processes in the UK. These fingerprinting techniques are applied to tracing CO2 injected into the Carbon Management Canada Field Research Station and use these to identify the fate of the CO2 injected into the site. The initial phase of the project will build on the recent work outlined above and undertake sampling and noble gas and C and O stable and clumped isotope analysis of CO2 captured from industrial processes including hydrogen production, steel manufacturing and cement production. These fingerprints will be compared to existing measurements of captured CO2 from power plants to establish how the fuel source, and temperature of the industrial process controls the natural tracer fingerprint. The results of these analysis will then be used to assess how effective these natural fingerprints will be in determining the fate of the injected CO2 in different engineered storage reservoirs and in tracing unplanned migration of the CO2 out of the storage site. he second portion of the project will build on an existing collaboration between researchers at the University of Edinburgh, and Carbon Management Canada (CMC) who have developed the field research station (FRS) facility in Alberta, Canada, following a $4.9-million investment by the Federal Government. The FRS is designed to inject CO2 into two relatively shallow horizons (300 and 500 m depth), enabling a large scale study of how CO2 may behave if it migrates from a deeper CO2 storage site. The site design permits sampling of subsurface fluids at various depths, and we will perform noble gas and clumped isotope analysis on the CO2 injected into the site and compare it to measurements made in migrated CO2 samples. These measurements will be used to establish how well the noble gas and clumped fingerprint of the injected CO2 is retained as it migrates through the subsurface and identify trapping mechanisms and degree of trapping efficiency of the injected CO2.
The final phase of the study will perform a comparison of this noble gas and clumped isotope data to other monitoring techniques which will be utilised at the FRS (e.g. stable isotope measurements). This will be combined with the fingerprints measured in industrial CO2 from the initial phase of the project and allow determination of how effective inherent fingerprints within industrial CO2 will be at tracing the migration and fate of that CO2 when it is injected into an engineered storage site.