Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage CCuS or Carbon Capture Utilisation and Sequestration is the process of capturing carbon dioxide (CO₂) before it enters the atmosphere, transporting it, and storing it.

Usually CO₂ is captured from large point sources, such as coal-fired power plant, a chemical plant or biomass power plant, and then stored in an subsurface geological formation. The aim is to prevent the release of CO₂ from heavy industry with the intent of mitigating the effects of climate change.  Although CO₂ has been injected into geological formations for several decades for various purposes, including enhanced oil recovery, the long-term storage of CO₂ is a relatively new concept.

CCuS is a relatively expensive process yielding a CO2 product with an intrinsically low value. Hence, carbon capture makes economically more sense when being combined with a utilisation process where the cheap CO₂ can be used to produce high-value chemicals (e.g. Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) techniques) to offset the high costs of capture operations.  CO₂ can be captured directly from an industrial source, such as a cement kiln, using a variety of technologies; including absorption, adsorption, chemical looping, membrane gas separation or gas hydration.

Currently about one thousandth of global CO₂ emissions are captured by CCuS.  Storage of CO₂ is in deep geological formations such as depleted clastic reservoirs that previously contained oil or gas resources.  To identify suitable depleted reservoirs requires geophysical, geological and petrophysical analysis.   Reservoir engineering expertise is required to predict reservoir capacity.  Well engineering is required to re-open and re-seal the well post-injection and geological modelling/geophysical monitoring is needed to ensure that subsurface migration of CO2 does not go beyond either geological limits or block boundaries. 

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