The U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $5 million grant to Western Michigan University researchers to help create a roadmap for carbon capture, use, and storage within the Michigan Basin’s geologic formations. The region is believed to have capacity to permanently store 70 gigatons of carbon-dioxide in five key reservoirs – with potential for even more.
“What’s really something that’s great about Michigan is that we kind of have a portfolio of options,” said Autumn Haagsma, assistant director of the Michigan Geological Survey at WMU.
Carbon-dioxide may be able to be stored in the state’s underground rock formations, whether Mount Simon Sandstone in the south, Sylvania Sandstone in the central region, or in the Niagaran Reef or St. Peter Sandstone up north.
Haagsma said carbon has for years been injected into underground rock formations in Michigan as part of enhanced oil recovery, but there are other opportunities, too. Permanent storage in saline reservoirs can be explored, along with new technologies that take advantage of unique geology in the Upper Peninsula.
“When CO2 is introduced into that type of rock it actually mineralizes and turns solid,” she said.
University researchers and students will guide a regional multidisciplinary project to develop a carbon management industry, investigating the various types of carbon-dioxide storage.
Collaborators will study three-dimensional modeling for subsurface impacts, transportation pipeline route analysis, seismic risk assessment, other potential uses of the gas and complete life cycle analysis.
The grant was funded for three years. By the end of the project, researchers will create a sort-of industry guidebook and a county-by-county map of potential places in Michigan where carbon storage is possible.
The federal funding comes as part of a larger, $44.5 million national effort to accelerate commercial-scale carbon capture, use and storage. The concept is to remove greenhouse gas emissions from sources like industrial plants or factories and store it underground so it can’t contribute to the accelerating climate crisis.
Among the eight other approved grants was a $5 million grant for Michigan-based Carbon Solutions LLC, of Okemos. The company will provide technical assistance for a carbon storage project within the Columbia River Basalt formation out West.
Brad Crabtree, DOE assistant secretary for fossil energy and carbon management, said in a statement that these funded projects are meant to advance basin-scale economies for carbon transport and storage.
Greenhouse gases like carbon-dioxide and methane trap heat from the sun within the planet’s atmosphere, causing global warming and related climate changes.
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