On 2nd-3rd September Eleanor Oldham attended the Geological Society’s 4th CCS Symposium on Effective Characterisation of Storage Sites. Many potential UK storage sites have made significant progress in their appraisal over the last year, and this was a recipe for some very interesting presentations. Perhaps the most exciting development to be reported was Perenco’s CO₂ injection test on the Poseidon project carried out in Q1 of 2025. The test demonstrated commercial rates of injection and served as a valuable fact-finding mission for injection, monitoring and logistics techniques.
Updates on the vast amount of work carried out on the Endurance and Humberside projects were also presented, alongside the identification of remaining uncertainties to be addressed with new data acquisition. In particular, the need for sufficient core data to adequately describe reservoir heterogeneities and dynamic data to calibrate the modelled pressure response.
Other presentation themes focused on maximizing the value from underused datsets. This thread included Eleanor’s talk on rock physics to assist with reservoir characterization, a demonstration of the applications of pulsed neutron and advanced noise logging for describing fluid flow and a thought-provoking discussion on the use of dark DAS¹ for independent monitoring.
The other key topic to be covered by the symposium was modelling fluid (and pressure) flow. Research institutes and operators alike were interested in the most effective way to model the dynamic behaviour of the reservoir and test the sensitivity of any potentially significant variables.
Overall, this was another excellent CCS Symposium held by the Geological Society. The breadth of presentations spoke to the excellent quality of work being carried out by the subsurface CCS sector. The UK’s CCS projects are continuing apace, so next year’s CCS symposium looks set to deliver another batch of stimulating talks.
¹ Dark DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) refers to the unutilized fibre-optic lines for telecommunications which can be used as a cost effective seismic monitoring system around CCS injection sites.
