Risk Management Network Meeting Report

Publication Overview

The Risk Management Network meeting was held as an in-person event with a particular focus on the risk of wells (particularly legacy wells) in a CCS project, looking at the topic from basin scale through to detailed characterisation of well materials and monitoring. Attended by over 75 delegates from 15 countries, the two day meeting was held at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. It was kicked off by a welcome reception in the Lyell Centre (home to both BGS and the Institute for GeoEnergy Engineering) and was followed by a field excursion to explore the geological history of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh and a tour of a very new distillery located in an old train station within stone’s throw of Holyrood Park.

Publication Summary

The meeting covered the following themes: industrial perspectives on risk management and legacy well containment; how to identify, evaluate and abandon well bores for the future; long-term well integrity – performance and risk assessment; well materials and testing; the challenges of monitoring, impact assessment and quantification; emerging solutions and approaches to monitoring; and finally a panel discussion on communicating well-related risk to regulators and other stakeholders.

As usual at IEAGHG Expert Network meetings, key conclusions and messages were drawn and recommendations were made. The concluding high-level messages noted that prospective storage sites with the fewest concerning legacy wells will rank among the most attractive for early deployment, but that availability of sites with higher quantity and/or lower quality of legacy wells might be unlocked as costs fall and technology to remediate improves – decisions that can be supported using approaches analogous to standard oil and gas industry ‘creaming curve’ analysis, as discussed later. Cements were a key topic with encouraging laboratory testing on legacy wells and samples showing the effectiveness of Portland cement as a barrier over time.

Monitoring and monitoring plans were discussed and can be made streamlined with time. Insurers and financiers are starting to create products and cross-cutting meeting would be beneficial as are finding a common lexicon for communication. Standardising and streamlining the permitting process was a recurrent theme. The participants also recognised the challenges remaining including quantifying leakage rates, quantifying expected containment; how currently well-behaved wells might be impacted in practice as we start to inject; impacts of doing remediation might be higher that impact of leak (in the case of legacy wells), data management of monitoring data – e.g. how to get real time data to shore from landers, or how to deal with extremely large datasets (e.g. DTS).