Geologic storage of CO₂ has gained significance, largely due to it being a green-house gas (GHG) and concerns related to impacts on climate from GHG emissions. The literature and experience from industrial analogs indicate that wellbores (both active/inactive or abandoned) may represent the most likely route for escape of the injected CO₂ from the storage reservoirs. Therefore, sound injection well design and life cycle well integrity of all wells is of critical importance in such projects, particularly from a storage perspective of 1000 years or more.

Challenges related to safe long-term CO₂ storage and its economics, principally in deep saline formations and to a lesser extent in depleted oil and gas reservoirs, can be broken down into two main categories: (1) Well integrity challenges and (2) Injectivity or Regularity challenges. This presentation will present key engineering factors that have to be addressed from a well integrity (primary) and injectivity/injected volume (secondary) perspective to enable a CO₂ geologic storage project to be a success.

In a CO₂ injection well, the principal well design considerations include pressure, thermal stresses, corrosion-resistant materials (tubulars and cements) and injection rates. Proper maintenance of CO₂ injection wells is important to avoid loss of well integrity. Plugging and abandonment procedures (and risks from legacy wellbores) are also important to ensure that the injected CO₂ will not escape out of the stored reservoir and are adequately addressed with sound engineering practices and regulatory compliance. Industry experience, particularly with CO₂ EOR, natural gas storage and acid/sour gas wells shows that new CO₂ storage injection wells can maintain life cycle well integrity if designed, constructed, operated and monitored as per current state-of-the-art design specifications (e.g. use of WELLCAT^TM, DrillPlan^TM, and other in-house proprietary software) and regulatory requirements.

This webinar is categorized under the Drilling and the Health, Safety, Environment, and Sustainability technical disciplines.

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