Geochemical Effects of Storing CO2 in the Basal Aquifer that Underlies the Prairie Region in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the area underlain by the Basal Aquifer in the Prairie region of Canada, there are 20 large CO 2 sources (coal-fired power plants, oil sands and heavy oil production and upgraders, refineries, chemical and petrochemical plants, fertilizer plants and cement plants) that emit more than 1 Mt CO2/year each, for a total of 83 Mt CO 2 /year,which represents 12% of canada ‘s anual greenhouse gas emissions. If post-combustion capture technologies are used, 75 Gt CO 2 /year can be captured from these sources, with a composition (% mass) estimated to be 99.95% CO 2 , 0.02% N 2 /Ar/O 2 , and 0.03% H 2 O. The Basal Aquifer comprises Middle Cambrian sandstones that overlie the crystalline Precambrian basement in the Alberta basin and the Canadian part of the Williston basin. Shales constitute the primary caprock of the Basal Aquifer. Pressures in the aquifer generally follow a gradient of 10.8 kPa/m. Temperatures in the aquifer vary between >150 °C in the deepest part of the Alberta Basin to less than 10 °C in outcrop areas. Water salinity ranges from > 300,000 mg/L in central Alberta to < 10,000 mg/L in the southwest and in the east. The formation water in the aquifer region suitable for CO 2 storage is NaCl dominated. Generally, at in-situ conditions, these waters are saturated with CaSO4 (anhydrite), with some at NaCl (halite) saturation. The mineralogy of the aquifer rocks and caprock were determined using a suite of laboratory analyses and normative calculations on core samples. The dominant mineral in the Basal Aquifer formation in regions suitable for CO 2 storage is quartz, which is generally present in the 65% to 95% range, while potassium feldspar is the next most common silicate. Pyrite is present in trace amounts in many of the samples. Calcite and illite, when present, are primarily pore- filling minerals. Calcium sulphate (anhydrite) is present in many of the samples, and, when present, is a pore-filling phase. In regard to the caprock, quartz is still a predominant mineral phase, comprising of at least one third of the rock for all samples. Potassium feldspar, illite and kaolinite are the next most common minerals. The ability of the rocks of the Basal Aquifer to react with CO2 is limited, with potassium feldspar and complex clays providing the bulk the reactive capacity via the formation of kaolinite, or potentially a coupled reaction forming alunite and calcite in anhydrite-bearing zones. The effect of these reactions on CO 2 storage capacity, aquifer porosity and permeability is limited, allowing decoupling of flow from geochemical processes. Caprock reactivity towards CO 2 is much greater due to its more complex mineralogy, however they will not propagate far into the caprock due to its low permeability, thus allowing decoupling of flow and geochemical processes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".