New Joint Industry Projects

The ambitions to grow offshore wind requires tremendous steps forward in engineering capabilities, alongside close integration with geoscience understanding, in order to increase the scale of deployment. Geosciences, and geoscientists, are integral to the whole lifecycle management of offshore windfarms, from initial site evaluation, foundation and layout design, through installation, and operations and maintenance, to lifetime extension, repowering and decommissioning strategies. Therefore, it is essential that the skills and training of geoscientists are focused on meeting these challenges. This proposed Joint Industry Programme (JIP) will train PhD students in the use of offshore datasets, the integration of geophysical and geotechnical data, in order to advance the development of ground models that capture geological information.

You can read the proposal document here.

Principal Investigators: Professor David Hodgson & Dr Natasha Barlow

A joint industry project focused on building a large relational database for the characterization of reservoir quality and top seal capacity of Triassic saline aquifers for CO2 storage in the UK continental shelf and North Sea region.

You can read the project proposal document and flier here. There is also a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document available here.

Principal Investigators: Professor Quentin Fisher, Professor Nigel Mountney, Dr Luca Colombera (University of Pavia) and Dr Adriana del Pino Sanchez (Petriva)

Fault rock properties for the energy transition: A joint industry project focused on:

• Upgrading current corporate fault rock databases by undertaking thorough QC to ensure that any poor quality data are either removed entirely from the database or flagged so that they can easily be filtered out by the user.
• Collecting new data on the flow properties of fault rocks by measuring the absolute permeability (using realistic brine compositions) and Hg-injection pressures of fault rocks under reservoir stress conditions to assess the accuracy of data currently used in industry.
• These experiments may lead to the development of corrections factors so that legacy databases can continue to be used with some confidence.
• Measuring relative permeabilities in the CO2-brine system, which will be ideally suited for modelling CO2 injection into faulted storage sites.

You can read the project proposal flier here.

Principal Investigators: Professor Quentin Fisher, Dr Sam Allshorn and Dr Adriana del Pino Sanchez (Petriva)

Rift basins and continental margins are ever more important as sites of resource development and potential
fluid storage opportunities for the Energy Transition. But fundamental to being able to identify and risk resources
and CO 2 /CH 4 /H 2 storage sites is the need to characterize a basin’s structural and stratigraphic architecture and its
geodynamic conditions.

Our aims are 1) to address critical research questions across a range of scales and stages in a rift’s
development, and 2) improve understanding of margin structure and basin evolution and assess how this impacts
opportunities and risks in resource management.

You can read the project proposal flier here.

Principal Investigator: Dr Richard Collier