Rick Chalaturnyk

University of Alberta

Do you really know where you're CO₂ is? Planning for drilling a new well through the CO₂ plume at Aquistore.

After a decade of injection and roughly 675,000 tonnes of CO₂ stored in the Winnipeg–Deadwood complex at Aquistore, a new monitoring well will be drilled through the CO₂ plume. The CO₂ Reservoir Evaluation (CO₂RE) well will provide what no seismic image can: core samples, a logging suite, and pressurized fluid samples from caprock and injection horizons exposed to CO₂ for over ten years. However, choosing where to drill to intersect the CO₂ plume was not trivial. Timelapse seismic and monitoring data constrain plume position differently, so CMG-GEM and TOUGH3 simulations were run across candidate locations to quantify uncertainty before selecting a target. Well design also presents challenges: drilling safely through a pressurized CO₂ zone, selecting corrosion-resistant materials, and incorporating fibre monitoring in a section with a rapidly squeezing salt zone. This talk presents the planning and unprecedented saturation, geomechanical, and geochemical observations, plus future monitoring from the new well at Aquistore.