Geological sequestration of CO2 on a massive scale implies that large area fractions of the underground could become flooded by CO2, imposing a unprecedented regulatory challenge to environmental authorities. Therefore we propose carbon sequestration bonds as complementary, market-based instruments that should further help to manage the risk of decadal-scale CO2 leakage. Such bond schemes addre...

Assessing the change in uncertainty in reservoir production forecasts over field lifetime is rarely undertaken because of the complexity of joining together the individual workflows. This becomes particularly important in complex fields such as naturally fractured reservoirs. The impact of this problem has been identified in previous and many solutions have been proposed but never implemented o...

Stochastic groundwater models enable the characterization of geological uncertainty. Often the major source of uncertainty is not related to aquifer heterogeneity, but to the general shape of the aquifer. This is especially the case in paleovalley-type alluvial aquifers where the bedrock surface limits the extent of easily extractable groundwater. Determining the shape of a bedrock surface is n...

To provide accurate predictions of flow performance, the numerical model of permeability used by flow simulators must be consistent with all available geological and engineering data. The available data includes core permeability measurements, relevant permeability statistics (particularly, histograms, measures of spatial variability, and correlation with secondary variables such as porosity), ...

In this paper we show how a Pearl Bayes network of inference can be used with a GIS in order to combine information from different sources of data for the purpose of classification. Data may include satellite images, topographic maps, geological maps etc, each one with its own resolution and accuracy. We show how this uncertainty in the input data is incorporated in the network and develop also...

Task Force was created to review and identify standards for CO2 storage capacity estimation. Force has previously issued a Phase I report (in August 2005) which served to document the nature of the problem such as the relationship between assessment scale and the level of detail and resolution of the storage capacity. This report of the Task Force's Phase II activities summarizes the Phase I fi...

The goal of exploration geophysics is to infer the nature of buried structure and, in particular, generate drill targets that lead to a mineral deposit discovery or reserve delineation. As a profession, we aim to turn geophysical data into geological information. Most geophysical techniques enable inferences to be made from airborne, ground-based or bore-hole data through a deterministic proces...

A viable means of CO2 reduction in the atmosphere is to capture and concentrate CO2 from large point sources such as power plants and petroleum refineries and store it by underground injection. The main concern for commercial scale CO2 sequestration in geologic formations is the uncertainties associated with this process. The risks involved in different stages of a CO2 sequestration project are...

The Neoproterozoic era was arguably the most revolutionary in Earth history. Extending from 1000 to 541 million years ago, it stands at the intersection of the two great tracts of evolutionary time: on the one side, some three billion years of pervasively microbial 'Precambrian' life, and on the other the modern 'Phanerozoic' biosphere with its extraordinary diversity of large multicellular org...