f Honouring Uncertainties in CO2 Storage Assessments – Preventing Overconfidence

With a global effort to reduce carbon emissions, an effort which will only increase in the coming decades, it is imperative that science providers deliver solutions that regulators and the public opinion will trust. Risk assessments are a critical component of establishing trust, and a requirement for any proper risk evaluation is an unbiased understanding of all the relevant uncertainties. So, the question is: how can the industry learn from decades of computer-assisted reservoir management of oil and gas production to make good predictions for the behaviour of injected CO2? We argue that uncertainty-centric workflows provide several keys to unlock the potential for addressing both the operators’ need to plan CO2 injection responsibly with the public regulators’ need to audit the injected CO2 volumes and ensure that the activity has a sufficiently low risk profile. Ensemble-based modelling offers the tools needed for investigating risks for CO2 storage projects, and a system for fast updates of data as the initial model needs updates from the monitoring stage.