A multidiscipline group of professors at the University of Houston, including several from the Petroleum Engineering Department of the Cullen College of Engineering, is continuing its research work into CO2 sequestration into depleted gas fields in the Texas Permian Basin.
About $11.1 million in funding was approved by the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory for the Permian Regional Carbon Sequestration Hub. Work on the project began in August 2024 and runs through August 2026.
The UH portion is about $1.25 million, and it is a collaborative faculty effort involving professors from multiple colleges.
- Petroleum Engineering: Dimitrios G. Hatzignatiou, Interim Department Chair and Professor (PI); Birol Dindoruk, American Association of Drilling Engineers Endowed Professor of Petroleum Engineering & Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (co-PI); Christine Ehlig-Economides, Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Chair and Professor (co-PI); Lori Hathon, Instructional Assistant Professor (co-PI); Michael T. Myers, Ali Daneshy Endowed College Professor and Associate Professor (co-PI); and Ganesh Thakur, Distinguished Professor (co-PI).
- College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics’ Earth & Atmospheric Sciences Department: John Castagna, Professor of Geophysics and Applied Seismology, and Margaret S. and Robert E. Sheriff Endowed Faculty Chair in Applied Seismology (co-PI); Robert Stewart, Director of the Allied Geophysical Labs and Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Chair in Exploration Geophysics (co-PI); and Yingcai Zheng, Robert and Margaret Sheriff Professor in Applied Geophysics (co-PI).
According to the project description, the Permian Regional Carbon Sequestration Hub Project is a feasibility study for the development of a carbon dioxide (CO2) storage hub to serve the Southern Delaware Basin in Ward, Winkler, Reeves, and Loving Counties, Texas. The study is utilizing existing data to characterize targeted Ordovician-Devonian geologic formations for CO2 storage that have an estimated storage resource of 75 million metric tons of CO2.
Research at UH are identified with eight different subtasks for the project — geophysics, formation evaluation, borehole geophysics, rock physics, core geomechanical properties, standard and special core scale measurements, core-scale simulation, and reservoir and aquifer pressure management.
Other participating entities include OMNIA as the overall project PI, New Mexico Tech, Texas Tech University, the University of Texas at Permian Basin, the University of Utah, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories.