A CO2-storage supply curve for North America and its implications for the deployment of carbon dioxide capture and storage systems

This paper presented a highly disaggregated estimate of carbon dioxide (CO2)-storage capacity of more than 330 onshore geological reservoirs across the United States and Canada. The demand placed upon these reservoirs by thousands of existing large anthropogenic CO2 point sources was also reviewed based on a newly developed methodology for estimating the effective storage capacities of deep saline formations, depleted oil and gas reservoirs, and deep unmineable coal seams. This analysis was based on matching the identified point sources with candidate storage reservoirs. By incorporating the updated source and reservoir data into the Battelle CO2-GIS, a series of pairwise costs for transporting CO2 from sites of anthropogenic CO2 sources was calculated along with the net cost of storing it in each of the candidate reservoirs within a specified distance of the point source. Results indicate a large and variably distributed North American storage capacity of at least 3,800 gigatonnes of CO2, with deep saline formations accounting for most of this capacity. A geospatial and techno-economic database of 2,082 anthropogenic CO2 point sources in North America, each with annual emissions greater than 100,000 tonnes of CO2, was also refined. Sensitivities examined for the CO2-storage cost curve focused on high/low oil and gas prices; the maximum allowed distance between source and reservoir; and, the infrastructure costs associated with CO2-driven hydrocarbon recovery. 20 refs., 5 figs