  CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technology is likely to be widely deployed in
coming decades in response to major climate and economics drivers: CCS is part
of every clean energy pathway that limits global warming to 2C or less and
receives significant CO2 tax credits in the United States. These drivers are
likely to stimulate capture, transport, and storage of hundreds of millions or
billions of tonnes of CO2 annually. A key part of the CCS puzzle will be
identifying and characterizing suitable storage sites for vast amounts of CO2.
We introduce a new software tool called SCO2T (Sequestration of CO2 Tool,
pronounced "Scott") to rapidly characterizing saline storage reservoirs. The
tool is designed to rapidly screen hundreds of thousands of reservoirs, perform
sensitivity and uncertainty analyses, and link sequestration engineering
(injection rates, reservoir capacities, plume dimensions) to sequestration
economics (costs constructed from around 70 separate economic inputs). We
describe the novel science developments supporting SCO2T including a new
approach to estimating CO2 injection rates and CO2 plume dimensions as well as
key advances linking sequestration engineering with economics. Next, we perform
a sensitivity and uncertainty analysis of geology combinations (including
formation depth, thickness, permeability, porosity, and temperature) to
understand the impact on carbon sequestration. Through the sensitivity analysis
we show that increasing depth and permeability both can lead to increased CO2
injection rates, increased storage potential, and reduced costs, while
increasing porosity reduces costs without impacting the injection rate (CO2 is
injected at a constant pressure in all cases) by increasing the reservoir
capacity.
