Pressure management via brine extraction in geological CO2 storage : adaptive optimization strategies under poorly characterized reservoir conditions

Industrial-scale injection of CO2 into the subsurface increases the fluid pressure in the reservoir, which if not properly controlled can potentially lead to geomechanical damage (i.e., fracturing of the caprock or reactivation of faults) and subsequent CO2 leakage. Brine extraction is one approach for managing formation pressure, effective stress, and plume movement in response to CO2 injection. The management of the extracted brine can be expensive (i.e., due to transportation, treatment, disposal, or re-injection), with added cost to the carbon capture and sequestration (CCS); thus, minimizing the volume of extraction brine is of great importance to ensure that the economics of CCS are favorable. The main objective of this study is to demonstrate the use of adaptive optimization methods in the planning of brine extraction and to investigate how the quality of initial site characterization data and the use of newly acquired monitoring data (e.g. pressure at observation wells) impact the optimization performance. We apply an adaptive management approach that integrates monitoring, calibration, and optimization of brine extraction rates to achieve pre-defined pressure constraints. Our results show that reservoir pressure management can be extremely benefited by early and high frequency pressure monitoring during early injection times, especially for poor initial reservoir characterization. Low frequencies of model calibration and optimization with monitoring data may lead to optimization problems because either pressure buildup constraints are violated or excessively high extraction rates are proposed. The adaptive pressure management approach may constitute an effective tool to manage pressure buildup under uncertain reservoir conditions by minimizing the volumes of extracted brine while controlling pressure buildup.