Carbon dioxide plumes, pressure space and legacy well risk for Southern North Sea CO₂ storage projects
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Smith, Alexandra
Hampson, Gary
Kivi, Iman Rahimzadeh
Krevor, Sam
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Unsecured legacy wells pose significant risks to carbon capture and storage (CCS) as they present potential leakage pathways for stored CO2 to return to the atmosphere. In the UK, legacy wells must be assessed for a carbon storage permit to be granted and high-risk wells require costly remediation. We use a well risk assessment scheme to evaluate the risk of wells in the Southern North Sea. We then combine our well risk assessment with investigation using the analytical tool CO2BLOCK, which relies on a gravity current model to estimate pressure and plume migration distances. We evaluate the Viking, Camelot and Poseidon projects, which plan to inject CO2 into the depleted reservoirs of Southern North Sea gas fields. Carbon dioxide plumes are typically several kilometers wide, and it should be possible to avoid plume migration to high-risk legacy wells. In contrast, pressure fields produced by CO2 injection are tens of kilometers wide and low magnitude pressure increases frequently extend beyond the bounds of storage licence areas. The pressure fields encounter hundreds of wells and in the cases of the Camelot and Poseidon projects, interact with each other.
Date Issued
2026-02-01
Date Acceptance
2025-10-13
Citation
Energy Geoscience, 2026, 7 (1)
ISSN
2666-7592
Publisher
KeAi Communications Co., Ltd.
Journal / Book Title
Energy Geoscience
Volume
7
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© 2025 Sinopec Petroleum Exploration and Protection Research Institute. Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Subjects
Carbon capture and storage (CCS)
CO2 storage
Geology
Geosciences, Multidisciplinary
LEAKAGE
Legacy well
Physical Sciences
Plume migration
Pressure constraint
Science & Technology
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
100475
Date Publish Online
2025-10-15