Investigating Sequestration Potential of Carbonate Rocks during Tertiary Recovery from a Billion Barrel Oil Field, Weyburn, Saskatchewan: the Geoscience Framework (IEA Weyburn CO2 Monitoring Project)

Introduction In Western Canada the application of CO2 injection for enhanced, ‘tertiary’ oil recovery is a relatively recent addition to the arsenal available to reservoir engineers. The first successful application of CO2 as a miscible fluid in Western Canada began in 1984 at Joffre Field, a Cretaceous marine siliciclastic reservoir in southern Alberta. A significant portion of the remaining proven conventional oil reserves in Western Canada, however, reside in large mature Paleozoic carbonate fields, such as the Mississippian Weyburn Field in SE Saskatchewan (Figure 1). In combination with economically dictated tertiary recovery schemes, these large fields could provide attractive geologic sites for future sequestration of greenhouse gases. An immediate challenge to geoscientists is to assess the ability of these geologic containers to store CO2 for geologically significant lengths of time.