Background to the Study

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the Office of Fossil Energy, and the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) invited IEAGHG to provide an independent and impartial peer review of selected projects within the DOE Office of Fossil Energy’s Carbon Storage Programme. In March 2015 Tim Dixon, James Craig and Samantha Neades from the IEAGHG convened a panel of five leading academic and industry experts from the USA, Germany, Australia and Sweden to conduct a peer review of 12 research projects. At the conclusion of each project review, these recognized technical experts provided recommendations on how to improve the management, performance, and overall results of each individual research project.

The DOE Carbon Storage program is focused on the development of advanced technologies to enable safe, cost-effective and permanent geological storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) both onshore and offshore. The technologies being developed will benefit both industrial and power sector facilities that will need to mitigate future CO2 emissions. The program’s aim is to improve the effectiveness of these advanced technologies to facilitate CO2 storage in different types of geological reservoirs and improve the ability to understand the behaviour of CO2 in the subsurface.

The panel discussed each project to identify and come to a consensus on each project’s strengths, weaknesses, and recommendations for project improvement. The panel concluded that the review provided an excellent opportunity to comment on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each project. The review has also provided an insjosirt into the range of technology development and the relative progress that has been made. The structure of the review, and the variety of different projects, has stimulated interest and engagement that should also be useful for the DOE program, especially the DOE project managers.

The report is free to download.