Underground reconnaissance and environmental monitoring related to geologic CO2 sequestration studies at the DUSEL Facility, Homestake Mine, South Dakota

Abstract

Underground field reconnaissance was carried out in the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) to identify potential locations for the planned geologic carbon sequestration experimental facility known as DUSEL CO2. In addition, instrumentation for continuous environmental monitoring of temperature, pressure, and relative humidity was installed at various locations within the Homestake mine. The motivation for this work is the need to locate and design the DUSEL CO2 facility currently being planned to host CO 2 and water flow and reaction experiments in long column pressure vessels over large vertical length scales. Review of existing geologic data and reconnaissance underground revealed numerous potential locations for vertical experimental flow columns, with limitations of existing vertical boreholes arising from limited vertical extent, poor continuity between drifts, and small diameter. Results from environmental monitoring over 46 days reveal spatial and temporal variations related to ventilation, weather, and ongoing dewatering of the mine.

Modeling heat transport processes in enhanced geothermal systems: A validation study from EGS Collab Experiment 1

“…4(a)). In the baseline measurement, the increasing temperature from well collar to bottom is consistent with previous temperature surveys (Dobson and Salve, 2009;Oldenburg et al, 2017) and numerical simulations (White et al, 2018). With the injection of chilled water, the temperature in the six monitoring wells gradually changed.…”

“…White et al (2018) summarized the sequence of major activities at the 4850 Level. To measure the temperature profile in the Experiment 1 testbed, several temperature surveys were conducted in 2009 and 2017 (Dobson and Salve, 2009;Oldenburg et al, 2017). A 2D numerical simulation considering the ambient geothermal gradient, hydrological state and major operations from 1949 to 2009 was performed to reconstruct the temperature, pore pressure and fluid saturation distributions around the West Access Drift (White et al, 2018).…”

Characterization of flow and transport in a fracture network at the EGS Collab field experiment through stochastic modeling of tracer recovery

“…The temperature conditions in the testbed was investigated through several temperature surveys in 2009 and 2017 as well as a numerical simulation (Dobson and Salve, 2009;White et al, 2018). Apart from of the native geothermal gradient, the many decades of mining and research operations have created a largely radial temperature gradient around the West Access Drift into the testbed.…”