Interface and Workflow Design and Implementation for Geological Carbon Storage Modeling, Simulation, and Risk Management

A significant barrier to large-scale deployment of geologic carbon storage (GCS) is the lack of confidence by some GCS stakeholders that environmental risks – those associates with potential leakage to overlying resources or the atmosphere, and induced seismicity – are small and manageable. The government has produced a scientific software system that contains state-of-the-art GCS analysis capabilities, but its user interface and software distribution paradigm are not sufficiently developed to meet a “market-ready” standard that would be required for wider application by industry and regulatory stakeholders with diverse backgrounds This project will generate innovative user interfaces for the government-supplied scientific software.Support for flexible workflows, provenance capture to document simulation history, advanced visualization capabilities, risk management support, and integration features to other GCS software will be provided. In addition, different stakeholders will be supported through specialized expert and wizard-based interfaces and the product will be made simple to install and run for any user. During the Phase I, a set of interviews with various stakeholder groups will be held to define requirements for the software. Detailed architecture plans for the software will be devised and documented.A prototype of a portion of the software system will be constructed and demonstrated to show the feasibility of the approach along with a prototype software distribution mechanism. Interaction with a local organization running three different GCS projects will also occur to establish the types of data that they can provide, and that they need for refining their operation. GCS is important for reduction in atmospheric greenhouse gas increases from large CO2 producers. Industry, government, and academia are all part of current efforts to study the long term risks and science of underground carbon storage, in order to mature the technologies to the point where they are accepted as stable and that the risks are understood. Having a robust software system for studying the impacts of GCS at specific locations under consideration would improve the scientific basis for engineering decisions, the risk assessments based on that science, the time to regulatory approval of the engineered systems, and acceptance by the general public.