The company’s product portfolio includes the world’s only technical service capable of practical, direct measurement of carbon dioxide or methane injected into underground depleted oil and gas reservoirs or saline formations.
The Queensland experience comes with a new partnership with the University of Queensland, funded by a one-year grant from the Australian National Low Emissions Coal Research & Development.
The funding aims to expand the application of WellDog’s Raman spectroscopy technology to track trace gases that may be sequestered alongside carbon dioxide.
Raman will be fine-tuned to sense the key signatures that result from trace gas reactions with formation geology.
“We are pleased to see our long-standing partnership with UQ result in this exciting project,” WellDog chief technology officer Quentin Morgan said.
“We are hopeful that it will increase our understanding of how geological formations respond to carbon sequestration and enhance our ability to sequester carbon dioxide in those formations over the long term.”
Separately, the company’s new division will apply Welldog’s suite of cost-effective downhole products and services to deliver the carbon sequestration services in the emerging CCS space.
“We are receiving increased interest in using our downhole reservoir characterisation and monitoring technologies to plan, monitor, and audit long-term carbon sequestration efforts in a variety of environments,” chief operations officer James Walker said.
“By establishing a division that is focused on this important need, we will be better able to help customers understand how to use these products and services to execute successful sequestration projects and to ensure long-term stability of sequestered carbon.”
There are just a handful of CCS projects around the world, but there are all aimed at capturing the CO2 from fuel combustion or industrial processes and injecting it into depleted reservoirs or deep saline formations far below the surface.
It is hoped that, if successfully proven, CCS can be a tool against carbon pollution.
In November, Shell’s Quest CCS project aims to capture one million tonnes per annum of carbon from the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta.
The world’s first CCS project, Sleipner, started in Norway in 1996 and continues to operate today, storing nearly 1Mmtpa of CO2 per annum in the North Sea.
CCS projects are entering operation, under construction or in advanced stages of planning in Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, bringing the world towards the threshold of 10MMtpa of CO2 captured and verified as stored every year.
In 2010, WellDog demonstrated how its reservoir Raman spectroscopy technology could monitor carbon dioxide sequestered in the Pump Canyon of New Mexico.
The company has also used that technology to conduct a variety of studies on naturally occurring carbon dioxide in coals and has used its complementary flow testing technologies to measure the permeability and flow characteristics of underground formations.
