Issues and needs

Controlling greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is a major challenge in the fight against global warming. In order to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, national and European political authorities are committed to the decarbonisation of our society in order to reduce CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere. Among the range of measures that need to be implemented, the capture of CO₂ emitted by industrial facilities and its sustainable storage deep underground is one of the more promising solutions being considered.

With a global storage capacity of at least 2,000 Gt, geological formations can trap very large volumes of CO₂ for millions of years. Knowledge of the behaviour of CO₂ in the subsurface has shown that carbon is efficiently trapped in a dense form (supercritical state) in the pores of reservoir rocks beyond a depth of 800 m.

For an industrial company to seize this opportunity, all the underground parameters around its facilities that emit the most CO₂ have to be studied to accurately assess the capacity for geological storage of CO₂.

Our added value

BRGM is a widely recognised player in research and innovation in the geological storage of CO₂, and shares its expertise on the subject with many scientific and technical networks (it is a member of the ANCRE Alliance, Chair of the French CO₂ club and of the European CO₂GeoNet network; it is also the French representative in the European research infrastructure for CO₂, ECCSEL).

As a recognised public institution for the knowledge, management and development of subsurface potential, BRGM is able to carry out the entire sequence of studies required to characterise and evaluate CO₂ storage capacities in the subsurface:

• Review of existing data (bibliographic and basin syntheses) to study the geology of the site.
• Reprocessing and interpretation of old data: use of geological exploration databases (oil and geothermal), subsurface database (BSS), access to drilling data (geophysics and core samples).
• Possible acquisition of additional data: geophysical imagery, new boreholes or deep core sampling.
• Experimental characterisation of reservoir and caprock reactivity following the injection of CO₂ (supercritical, gaseous, dissolved).
• 3D geological modelling of the storage system (reservoir and cover): simulation of injection and water-CO₂-rock interactions to predict the migration of CO₂ migration in the reservoir and its mineral fate (long carbon cycle).
• Estimation of long-term storage capacities by means of predictive numerical simulations.
• Study of the risks and impacts of storage on the underground environment (leaks, overpressure, etc.).
• Development of sensors and protocols for the monitoring of future storage sites during and after the injection period.