Analysis of CO₂ trapping capacities and long-term migration for geological formations in the Norwegian North Sea using MRST-co2lab

MRST-co2lab is a collection of open-source computational tools for modeling large-scale and long-time migration of CO₂ in conductive aquifers, combining ideas from basin modeling, computational geometry, hydrology, and reservoir simulation. Herein, we employ the methods of MRST-co2lab to study long-term CO₂ storage on the scale of hundreds of megatonnes. We consider public data sets of two aquifers from the Norwegian North Sea and use geometrical methods for identifying structural traps, percolation-type methods for identifying potential spill paths, and vertical-equilibrium methods for efficient simulation of structural, residual, and solubility trapping in a thousand-year perspective. In particular, we investigate how data resolution affects estimates of storage capacity and discuss workflows for identifying good injection sites and optimizing injection strategies.