The Synergetic Utilisation Of CO2 Storage Coupled With Geothermal Energy Deployment (SUCCEED) project brings together eight partners from across academia and industry interested in CO2 capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS).

The project aims at accelerating and maturing the use of CCUS by developing, testing and demonstrating measurement, monitoring and verification technologies that can be used in most CO2 geological storage projects.

The team will be working with two existing facilities at Kizildere in Turkey and Hellisheidi in Iceland.

Led by Professor Sevket Durucan at Imperial College London, SUCCEED will run for three years and is funded by ACT,  an international initiative to establish CCUS as a tool to combat global warming.

The SUCCEED project covers a number of key R&D challenges that have been identified as critical challenges to accelerate the commercialisation of CCUS:

  • Testing and demonstrating innovative monitoring technologies
  • Accelerated testing and assessment of the effectiveness and validation of a number of CO2 injection and plume monitoring techniques
  • Assessment of the potential for induced seismicity from CO2 injection
  • Investigation of field scale behaviour of injected CO2

In addition to these, there are a number of commercial areas that are specific to geothermal CCUS fields, which the project will address including:

  • Prospective revenue streams and related business models
  • Open new market opportunities for the new monitoring technologies solutions.

Pilot sites

Crucial to SUCCEED's work is the access to two existing industrial scale geothermal production sites and injection/monitoring wells. These will be used to pilot the technologies as they are developed, with the potential to upscaling to industrial size in an early commercial phase.

The project will inject CO2 into the reservoir either in supercritical state (at Kizildere in Turkey), or as dissolved gas in the re-injected geothermal fluid (at the Hellisheidi field in Iceland).

Rock-fluid interactions

The SUCCEED team will undertake research into the geochemical, geomechanical and geophysical response of reservoirs to CO2 injection.

The aim is to understand the response of carbonate rocks to the injection of supercritical CO2 at high-pressure/high-temperature reservoir conditions, seismic response, impact on flow properties, geochemistry and the integrity of the reservoir rock on change in strength.

The results will be used by the team when looking at field performance, as well as long-term injection strategies planning.

Monitoring of CO2 injection operations

The team will be working on monitoring the CO2 injection operations, site performance and reservoir behaviour at Kizildere and Hellisheidi sites.

This will provide information on the changes in field parameters and in geochemistry and geomechanics of the geothermal field, as well as the fate of the CO2 plume. They will use different, site-adjusted surface and downhole monitoring activities.

Besides the application of standard monitoring technologies, the team will develop and use new and innovative seismic monitoring techniques and hardware (electric seismic-vibrator; iDAS system).

Reservoir modelling

SUCCEED will be using computer models to investigate alternative injection and reservoir performance scenarios.

They will use pre- and post-CO2 injection simulations of the changes in reservoir pressure, associated geochemistry and geomechanical reservoir properties. The models will be calibrated using historical and project-obtained monitoring data. A key part of the workwill be the fault/fracture behaviour and potential for induced seismicity with different injection/production scenarios.

CO2 injection strategies

The team will undertake a techno-economic assessment and optimisation of a field-wide/regional CO2 injection strategy.

They will identify strategies that optimise CO2 injection as well as potential CO2 storage performance and geothermal energy production in the field.

The studies will investigate different CO2 injection strategies, including injection-wells selection and injection rates, to evaluate their performance in terms of long-term pressure maintenance of the geothermal field while minimising production of injected CO2.

The work will also investigate the development and implementation of a regional-scale CO2 transport infrastructure for use in CO2 injection along the Büyük Menderes Graben and the regional CCUS potential in the area.

Life-cycle environmental impacts

SUCCEED will establish life-cycle assessment (LCA) models that reflect the engineering processes in order to assess the scalability of enhanced geothermal and CCUS systems considering environmental and resource constraints

Stakeholder Engagement

The team will investigate and develop stakeholder and public communication and education activities with regards to the CCUS technology blueprint developed and the validation of monitoring, modelling, and verification methodologies applicable to these systems.