Over the last 2 years, CSSR deputy directors Martin Fernø (UiB/NORCE) and Jan Martin Nordbotten (UiB/NORCE), together with their research groups, have worked on developing the FluidFlower experimental rig to become an arena for international verification of geological carbon storage simulation capabilities.
This work is now culminating in a special issue of the journal Transport in Porous Media, with 15 contributed papers currently under review from around the world. The CSSR team is involved in seven of these papers, including the centerpieces of the effort. The interdisciplinary collaborative effort is a double-blind forecasting and validation study, where nine academic research groups active in numerical simulation of carbon storage from around the world forecasted the outcome of a carefully curated carbon storage operation in the FluidFlower (Flemisch et al.). The forecasting and validation study is made possible through a suite of laboratory work, involving petrophysical characterization and experiments, documented in detail to be available as a resource for carbon storage modelers worldwide (Fernø et al.). To bridge the gap between laboratory measurements and simulation technology required the development of DarSIA, a dedicated image analysis toolbox for porous media which has been released open-source (Nordbotten et al.).
The core papers mentioned above are supported by additional papers on the experimental methodology (Eikehaug et al.), detailed supporting experimental data (Haugen et al.) and the value of field-pilot type training data for operational forecasting (Saló-Salgado et al.). The final piece of the puzzle is showing how the learnings at the lab scale translate to the field scale, as analyzed by Tony Kovscek of Stanford University, who spent his sabbatical visiting Bergen during the fall of 2022 (Kovscek et al.).
