Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership

During this year, the Southern States Energy Board is completing work on Phase I of the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership research initiative. The two-year Phase I study utilized a regional approach to determine what options exist for sequestering carbon dioxide, should such a program be needed in the future. SECARB, which is managed by SSEB, is one of seven regional partnerships working with the U.S. Department of Energy. SECARB and the other regional partnerships work with the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) to assess issues related to the capture, transport, storage and use of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel sources.

The SECARB territory initially encompassed a nine-state region including the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. In March of 2004, Texas and Virginia were added to the region. In March of 2005, portions of Kentucky and West Virginia were included in the SECARB Phase II work plan.

Phase II is a four-year field verification program, with the U.S. Department of Energy providing $14.3 million in funding and SECARB partners providing over $5.6 million.

SECARB has completed the screening of potential sources and sinks for carbon sequestration. The findings reveal that potential sources of CO₂ emissions are located throughout the region, with large coal-fired power plants being the most prominent emitters. Also, the findings demonstrate that the region has numerous and diverse terrestrial and geologic sinks that could serve as the most promising sinks for sequestering CO₂.

SECARB’s Phase II work focuses on the most promising opportunities for geologic sequestration within the region that promote the development of a framework and infrastructure necessary for the validation and deployment of carbon sequestration technologies. Phase II refines Phase I concepts and begins to validate, through field testing, sequestration technologies and corresponding infrastructure approaches related to regulatory, permitting and outreach. The multi-partner collaborations developed during Phase I continue in Phase II.

Phase II consists of three diverse field tests broken down into phases aligned with project definition, design, implementation, operations and closeout/reporting; continued characterization of regional sequestration opportunities; and cross-cutting services in education and outreach, regulatory and permitting, monitoring, measurement and verification, geographical information systems and project management. SECARB will develop best practices manuals to support regional transferability and wide-scale deployment.

The field tests are:
 

	G1 - A Gulf Coast Stacked Storage Project that builds upon the Gulf Coast Carbon Center of The University of Texas Bureau of Economic Geology’s experience managing the Frio Basin Project and investigates a stacked sequence of hydrocarbon and brine reservoir intervals, where enhanced oil recovery with CO2 can serve as an economic driver in establishing the CO2 infrastructure;
	G2-A and G2-B - A Coal Seam Project for validation of sequestration opportunities in the Central Appalachian Basin and the Black Warrior Basin, where CO2 enhanced coal bed methane recovery operations can add economic value and where unmineable coals can provide sequestration opportunities; and
	G3 - A Saline Aquifer Test Center Project that focuses on validating geologic storage in close proximity to a Southern Company coal-fired power plant (part of the Electric Power Research Institute’s Test Center program) located in the Mississippi Salt Basin and separated from the Gulf Coast Salt Basin by the Wiggins Arch (Field Tests G1 and G3 are located in distinctly different saline sinks).

Each field team has assumed responsibility for the technical scope of work, local education and outreach, permitting, MMV and maintaining the validation test’s schedule and budget. Each team contributes new information to the continued characterization of the region. In addition, a task has been dedicated to integrating field data and filling gaps in regional characterization data sets. Data and tools developed in the continued characterization task will be incorporated into a relational database and GIS.

All three field tests, the continued characterization project and the cross-cutting functions support the FutureGen Initiative by validating technologies and identifying locations throughout the region that could support future full-scale geologic sequestration deployment opportunities. FutureGen is a highly efficient and technologically sophisticated coal-fired power plant that will produce both hydrogen and electricity and achieve near-zero emissions by utilizing carbon sequestration technologies.

Three SSEB member states, Kentucky, Texas and West Virginia, are among the seven states that submitted site proposals to the U.S. Department of Energy and the FutureGen Industrial Alliance in a competition to host the $1 billion research facility.
To learn more about SECARB, please visit our website at www.secarbon.org.