Could this be the future of secure CO2 storage?

Carbon capture and storage has been of interest to many researchers to mitigate the anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide in recent years. Projects to store supercritical CO2 in aquifers have been developed. However, there is a great uncertainty about the leakage of CO2 out of the storage formation under buoyancy. Shariatipour et al 2012 presented the CO2/brine down-hole mixing method (DHM) which could improve the security of CO2 sequestration in geological formations. In this aforementioned method water is extracted near the top of the aquifer, CO2 is mixed with water in the intermediate section of this
well, and then the water with dissolved CO2 is injected at the bottom of the formation. It was concluded that this method could be an engineering solution to tackle the leakage risk of free phase CO2 through the caprock.

In this study the application of down-hole mixing in a real field model (Lincolnshire – Smith et al 2012) is examined. Calculations are performed to identify the optimum level of water extraction and injection of dissolved CO2 in brine. In addition, simulations will be presented to show the other advantages of using DHM on CO2 storage (e.g. CO2 injection for much longer period).