The Southern States Energy Board led a coalition of southern universities and technical experts to assess prospective geologic storage resources for carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the State and Federal waters of three planning areas:

The Mid-Atlantic

The South Atlantic

The eastern Gulf of America

The goal of the Southeast Offshore Storage Resource Assessment (SOSRA) project was to develop a high-level approximation of the amount of CO₂ that might be stored utilizing key geologic and environmental factors that influenced the storage potential.

The research included significant advances in knowledge and technology that facilitated assessment and quantification of offshore CO₂ storage resources in the SOSRA region and provided a pathway toward commercialization.

SSEB served as the overall lead for the project. To perform the work, SSEB partnered with Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University’s Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research, the University of South Carolina, and Oklahoma State University for local management of the three planning areas. The Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals, and Energy; South Carolina Geological Survey; Geological Survey of Alabama; and Advanced Resources International also provided technical expertise to the project.

A proposal to support the SOSRA project was submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in March. SSEB received notification of selection for award negotiations in June 2015. The SOSRA project was underway for three years, beginning on October 1, 2015.

The University of Texas at Austin led a sister project funded under the same DOE program entitled the Offshore CO₂ Storage Resource Assessment of the Northern Gulf of Mexico (Upper Texas-Western Louisiana Coastal Areas). The University of Texas at Austin, in partnership with Southern States Energy Board, studied the inner continental shelf portions of the Texas and Louisiana Gulf of Mexico coastal areas in order to assess the CO₂ storage capacity of depleted oil and natural gas reservoirs. This work also assessed the ability of regional saline geological formations to safely and permanently store nationally significant amounts of CO₂. The results of this work improved the understanding of CO₂ storage potential for a large area of the Gulf of Mexico adjacent to significant industrial emissions sources. SSEB provided regional education and outreach support for the project.