Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage

What is carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS)?

CCUS involves the capture of CO₂, generally from large point sources like power generation or industrial facilities that use either fossil fuels or biomass as fuel. If not being used on-site, the captured CO₂ is compressed and transported by pipeline, ship, rail or truck to be used in a range of applications, or injected into deep geological formations such as depleted oil and gas reservoirs or saline aquifers.

What is the role of CCUS in clean energy transitions?

CCUS can be retrofitted to existing power and industrial plants, allowing for their continued operation. It can tackle emissions in hard-to-abate sectors, particularly heavy industries like cement, steel or chemicals. CCUS is an enabler of least-cost low-carbon hydrogen production, which can support the decarbonization of other parts of the energy system, such as industry, trucks and ships. Finally, CCUS can remove CO₂ from the air to balance emissions that are unavoidable or technically difficult to abate.

Combining CO₂ Sequestration with enhanced oil recovery to reduce global warming and produce more domestic energy

Large volumes of technically recoverable domestic oil resources remain undeveloped or are yet to be discovered in the United States. The EOR potential associated with CO₂ represents a large portion of this potential. Undeveloped U.S. domestic oil resources that are still in the ground (in-place) total 1,124 billion barrels. Of this large in-place resource, 430 billion barrels are estimated to be technically recoverable. This resource includes undiscovered oil, “stranded” light oil amenable to CO₂ EOR technologies, unconventional oil (deep heavy oil and tar sands) and new petroleum concepts (residual oil in reservoir transition zones). Michigan is typical of mature basins where initial wells produced only about 30 percent of the hydrocarbons in place. Using CO₂ injection to increase formation pressure and reduce oil viscosity can produce another 20 percent, potentially bringing millions of additional barrels of oil to production annually.

Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership

Western Michigan University was one of 40 partners in an eight state research consortium, the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, led by Battelle. Michigan’s industry partner is Core Energy, LLC. The Michigan Geological Repository for Research’s role in the partnership involved examining and sampling cores archived here to determine their reservoir characteristics, such as porosity and permeability, and using that data in modeling to better understand the geology and fluid-flow characteristics of the rocks. Funded by the Department of Energy, the MRCSP was part of a larger-scale strategy to reduce CO₂ emissions. The partnership was one of seven regional partnerships set up to assess the technical potential, economic viability and public acceptance of carbon sequestration within each region.

Michigan’s porous rocks have the largest capacity to store CO₂ of all the states in the country, providing Michigan with excellent opportunities for addressing CO₂ problems through geologic sequestration. Preliminary investigations show that hundreds of gigatons of CO₂ can be sequestered in Michigan underground formations. This represents potential storage of hundreds of years’ emissions at current levels. From 2003 to 2005, the partnership carried out a detailed assessment of each region’s potential to store CO₂ and defined possible field demonstration sites. One such site was identified in northern Michigan. That site was one of several involved in small-scale field tests (2005 to 2010) to assess the sequestration potential in the region.