The Iona gas storage facility: an analogue for CO2 storage

Purpose

The activity aims to use the Iona gas storage facility to better understand geological and geomechanical issues relating to CO2 storage. A large emphasis of the project will be to compare the geological properties and geomechanical behaviour of the Iona reservoir to that of the nearby Otway Project. This in turn may enable more general conclusions to be drawn regarding natural gas storage at the 1000 or so sites around the world as an analogue for CO2 storage. The Iona facility is unique in that a large dataset has been acquired over the 15 or so years of its operation. This will hopefully lead to an evaluation of the reservoir stress path, elasticity of the reservoir, and strength and transmissibility properties of the intra-reservoir faults.

Summary

This project is made possible due to the fact that TRUenergy is providing access to nearly all available data on the Iona storage field. This data includes various wireline logs, 3D seismic data, rock mechanical testing results, reservoir models, access to drill core, injection/ withdrawal history and consultancy reports among other various data.

The project will be comprised of 4 main research directions:

• a Geologic/Geomechanical comparison of Iona and the Otway Project sites;
• pore Pressure/Stress coupling and “Elasticity” of the reservoir;
• injectivity of the Waarre C; and,
• fault analysis: Stability and Sealing Behaviour.