Noble Gases as Monitoring Tracers in CCS: A Case Study with CO2 from the Waste-to-Energy Plant Klemetsrud, Norway

Techno-Economic Aspects of Noble Gases as Monitoring Tracers

“…Atmospheric values from [7]. Captured CO 2 from several sites [11][12][13]. In cm 3 STP /cm Natural, geologic CO 2 shows dominantly magmatic, and hence, mantle signatures with subsequent equilibration with radiogenic formation water.…”

“…The noble gas signature of captured CO 2 has been analyzed for several capture plants in Norway [12,13] and other countries [11]. Noble gas concentrations are typically low and the isotopic signatures are either airlike for plants with combustion prior to capture (e.g., waste incineration) or natural-gas-like (e.g., natural gas processing).…”

“…Our calculations assume full equilibration of the injected CO 2 with formation water. In [13], we argued that equilibrium is likely to be reached, considering that at the front of a moving CO 2 -plume, the concentration gradients between the two phases, formation water, and CO 2 are high. For a dedicated storage case, such a behavior was, for example, observed at Aquistore, where the injected CO 2 had adopted a radiogenic signature one year after injection [11].…”

“…This practically labels most environmental reservoirs with an identifiable atmospheric [7], crustal (radiogenic) [8], or mantle [9] signature [10]. Further, injected CO 2 from various capture processes (anthropogenic) has an inherent noble gas signature, which depends on the CO 2 source and capture process [11][12][13].…”

“…In [12,13], we outlined that the injected CO 2 is likely to inherit a radiogenic noble gas signature from the storage formation waters through equilibration or mixing with native formation gases. The calculation based on phase partitioning data for a high-pressure CO 2 -H 2 O-system [20] led to the hypothesis that injected CO 2 becomes differentiable from atmospheric signatures without the need of adding tracers.…”