CARBON SOLUTIONS LLC — Department of Energy SBIR Phase I: 24d

Description

The subsurface currently constitutes the Nation’s primary source of energy, providing more than 80 percent of total energy needs. Not only will the subsurface continue to play a critical role for the Nation with existing technologies, such as conventional oil and gas production and geothermal energy, the subsurface has the potential to play a key role in sustained energy security through new, enhanced, and expanded energy technologies. These technologies include CO2 sequestration, energy storage, CO2-enhanced-oil and gas production from tight reservoirs, and CO2-geothermal energy. A key barrier for stimulating this new industry is enabling CO2- emitting facilities to identify CO2-based subsurface opportunities in their region. This requires a software tool and database that can calculate dynamic CO2 storage and CO2-based utilization and coupling this with realistic economics. We propose to develop that tool—called SCO2TPRO—and help stimulate this multi-billion dollar industry. This project will develop and commercialize a new tool called SCO2TPRO to help industry explore CO2 storage and utilization opportunities in the subsurface, including accessing value CO2 tax credits, energy extraction, and electricity generation. We will (1) develop and integrate new reduced-order models (ROMs) to support SCO2TPRO’s sequestration capability, (2) prototype novel utilization ROMs for oil and gas production and CO2-geothermal energy extraction, (3) build the Nation’s first sequestration and utilization geologic database and demonstrate SCO2TPRO, and (4), integrate all developments into the commercial SCO2TPRO software. Phases II and III will build on this development by, for the very first time, creating ROMs for applications including CO2-geothermal and oil/gas production from tight reservoirs. Current CO2 sequestration and utilization strategies require extensive runs of high- performance computing (HPC) physics-based models that take tens of thousands of CPU-hours to evaluate scenarios. This is not scalable. The technical goal of our project is to overcome this problem by developing and commercializing a tool that closely approximates the accuracy of full- physics models while being approximately eight orders of magnitude faster running on a laptop. Our strategy is based on commercializing SCO2TPRO to be a workhorse tool for CARBON SOLUTIONS LLC that supports and grows industrial utilization of the subsurface. In Phase II and III, we will mature the software to the stage it can be licensed to other companies. There is a substantial anticipated new market for storing and utilizing CO2 in the subsurface, per- haps as much as $125 billion ($125B) in capital investment in the next 15 years and ~$20 billion per year ($20B/yr) within 25 years, resulting in tens of thousands of new jobs.