Kevin M. Ellett

Carbon Solutions LLC

Energy system planning tools suggest that the cost and feasibility of climate-stabilizing energy transitions are sensitive to the cost of CO2 capture and storage processes (CCS), but the representation of CO2 transportation and geologic storage in these tools is often simple or non-existent. We develop the capability of producing dynamic-reservoir-...

Meeting greenhouse gas emission reduction targets will likely require identifying and assessing subsurface storage space for sequestering billions of tonnes of CO2 each year. Accomplishing this feat could include estimating the cost and capacity for thousands to hundreds-of-thousands of potential geologic CO2 storage sites with CO2 storage screenin...

Carbon dioxide (CO2) storage in deep saline aquifers is a vital option for CO2 mitigation at a large scale. Determining storage capacity is one of the crucial steps toward large-scale deployment of CO2 storage. Results of capacity assessments tend toward a consensus that sufficient resources are available in saline aquifers in many parts of the wor...

The United States (US) has pledged to create a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 and a net-zero emissions economy by no later than 2050. CO2 capture and storage (CCS) will likely play a key role in this energy transition and will have to be deployed on a massive scale. Reaching a carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035 will likely requi...

Method paper for Decarbonizing the Coal-Fired Power Sector in China via Carbon Capture, Geological Utilization, and Storage Technology

Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is a critical technology to realize carbon neutrality target in the Chinese coal-fired power sector, which emitted 3.7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2017. However, CCUS technology is often viewed as an “alternative technology” option owing to common perceptions of relatively high cost and potent...

Scholars worldwide leverage science gateways/VREs for a wide variety of research and education endeavors spanning diverse scientific fields. Evaluating the value of a given science gateway/VRE to its constituent community is critical in obtaining the financial and human resources necessary to sustain operations and increase adoption in the user com...

Meeting global energy and environmental targets requires a new understanding of the science of large-scale injection and storage of CO 2 .

CO2 capture and storage (CCS) technology is likely to be widely deployed in the coming decades in response to major climate and economics drivers: CCS is part of every clean energy pathway that limits global warming to 2°C or less and receives significant CO2 tax credits in the United States. These drivers are likely to stimulate the capture, trans...

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...

Commercial-scale carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will involve deploying infrastructure on a massive and costly scale. This effort will require careful and comprehensive planning to ensure that capture locations, storage sites, and the dedicated CO2 distribution pipelines are selected in a robust and cost-effective manner. Introduced in...

CO2 capture and storage (CCS) is a climate change mitigation strategy that aims to reduce the amount of CO2 vented into the atmosphere from industrial processes. Designing cost-effective CCS infrastructure is critical to meet CO2 emission reduction targets and is a computationally challenging problem. We outline this challenge and present a novel a...

This report by the Indiana Geological & Water Survey (IGWS) assessed the storage resource estimate (SRE) of Cambrian-Ordovician stratigraphic units located within the CarbonSAFE prefeasibility area within the Illinois Basin. A comprehensive data set of wireline logs and petrophysical information was used. These data include core analysis for porosi...

Carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) is a promising technology for mitigating climate change, and its implementation is considered critical to meeting threshold targets for global warming in the 21st century. We have developed a new science gateway application for the successful modeling software known as SimCCS that is used for evaluating comp...

Several workers have applied water flux models based on convective heat-transfer principles and measured temperature profiles to quantify vertical water movement through unsaturated soils. However, flux estimates can vary significantly due to uncertainty in soil thermal properties such as thermal diffusivity, thermal conductivity, and soil volumetr...

The application of integrated system models for evaluating carbon capture and storage technology has expanded steadily over the past few years. To date, such models have focused largely on hypothetical scenarios of complex source-sink matching involving numerous large-scale CO2 emitters, and high-volume, continuous reservoirs such as deep saline fo...

Unmineable coal seams are an important target for investigating the economic viability of carbon capture and storage technology owing to their potential for simultaneous CO2 storage and enhanced coalbed methane production. As such, recent developments in integrated system models are aiming to explicitly incorporate coal seam storage and enhanced me...

The challenge of evaluating the economic and technical feasibility of implementing carbon capture and storage technology has led to new developments in integrated system modelling. Of particular importance is the explicit implementation of CO2 utilization opportunities such as enhanced oil recovery because storage-only projects have struggled to mo...

Horizontal ground-couple heat pump (GCHP) system incurs lower installation cost compared with the vertical GCHP system. However, the shallow burial depth makes the heat transfer process susceptible to seasonal variations. This paper analyzes the short-term and annual performance of different geothermal heat exchangers' (GHEs) configurations and geo...

Cambrian-Ordovician strata of the midwestern United States are considered a promising reservoir for geologic storage of carbon dioxide. To assess the potential of the Ordovician St. Peter Sandstone, storage-resource estimates were generated using a hierarchical approach to estimating prospective storage resources. The method employs a series of inc...

The availability of integrated system modeling tools for carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is an important element in facilitating decision-making for potential CCS project deployment. Such tools have the power to integrate complex scientific, engineering, and economic aspects of specific CCS technologies to design optimal infrastructure...

Despite the superior energy effi ciency of geothermal heat pump systems, widespread adoption of the technology is hindered by the higher initial capital cost relative to conventional heating and cooling systems. A promising avenue for reducing fi rst costs is better characterization of salient subsurface properties and the subsequent implementation...

Data from six monitoring stations were combined with a soil-water dynamics model (HYDRUS 1D) to achieve physically-based estimates of shallow water-table recharge in representative hydropedological settings of the glaciated midwestern U.S.A. Calibration involved inverse modeling that yielded optimized hydraulic parameters. Root mean square errors f...

Thorough characterization of the spatiotemporal variability in soil thermal properties can facilitate better designs for horizontal geothermal heat pump (HGHP) systems by reducing ground heat exchanger (GHEX) costs. Results are presented from a new monitoring network installed across a range of glaciated terrains in Indiana (USA), including the fir...

Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) is a key mitigation technology, capable of reducing CO2 emissions on an industrial scale without requiring a fundamental restructuring of energy systems. To have a meaningful impact, CCUS will have to be applied to natural gas and coal-fired power plants; this will require power utilities developing bu...

In this work, we present a collaborative effort between US and Chinese ACTC scientists to create the first comprehensive study of what a large and integrated commercial scale CCUS system could look like in China. We focus on the Ordos Basin, which is slightly larger than New Mexico, the fifth largest state in the US. The basin has a large number of...

To meet the ambitious goals of both the United States and China for advancing the deployment of Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage technology will require an improved understanding of the magnitude and geographical distribution of carbon geologic storage (CGS) resources. Evaluation of CGS resources and the fractional component of practical stor...

A semi-analytical model for simulating injection of an immiscible fluid into a water-filled reservoir is developed which approximates the effects of horizontal injection wells, impermeable fault segments, and permeability anisotropy on phase saturation and fluid pressure. The modeling approach is based upon (1) an analytic element model for single-...

The feasibility of storing carbon dioxide (CO2) in geologic formations as a means to mitigate global climate change is being evaluated around the globe. One option that has received limited attention is to store CO2 in shale formations that are currently productive unconventional shale gas plays. While CO2 trapping mechanisms in saline aquifers are...

A series of Mb 3.8-5.5 induced seismic events in the midcontinent region, United States, resulted from injection of fluid either into a basal sedimentary reservoir with no underlying confining unit or directly into the underlying crystalline basement complex. The earthquakes probably occurred along faults that were likely critically stressed within...

The Mount Simon and Lower Knox Group Formations within the Illinois Basin, USA, are being considered as targets for carbon dioxide (CO 2) storage. Two main concerns related to the subsurface storage process are potential leakage of CO 2 from the storage formation to the atmosphere and possible migration of CO 2 or displaced brine into underground s...

This paper describes a soil moisture data set from the 82,000 km2 Murrumbidgee River Catchment in southern New South Wales, Australia. Data have been archived from the Murrumbidgee Soil Moisture Monitoring Network (MSMMN) since its inception in September 2001. The Murrumbidgee Catchment represents a range of conditions typical of much of temperate...

Approximately 3.8 million cubic meters of surface water was applied to spreading ponds from 2003–2007 to ar fi cially recharge the underlying aquifer through a 200-meter thick unsaturated zone in the San Gorgonio Pass area in southern California. A study was con-ducted between 1997 and 2003, and a numerical model was developed to help determine the...

We recently developed and applied a new parallel, multi-layer, finite-element model to the Illinois Basin in order to assess the spatial extent and magnitude of pore pressure increases resulting from the annual projected injection of 100 million metric tons of CO2. One focus of this work is to assess the potential for inducing a seismic event assoc...

By exploiting the near-surface heat reservoir, ground-source heat pumps (GSHP) represent an important renewable energy technology that can be further developed by establishing data sets related to shallow (<100m) thermal regimes. Although computer programs are available for GSHP installers to calculate optimal lengths and configurations of ground-c...

Millions of pounds of mercury (Hg) were deposited in the river and stream channels of the Sierra Nevada from placer and hard-rock mining operations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The resulting contaminated sediments are relatively harmless when buried and isolated from the overlying aquatic environment. The entrained Hg in the sediment constitu...

Groundwater pumping in the Bicycle Basin in the northern Mojave Desert, one of the major sources of water supply at Fort Irwin National Training Center (NTC), California, has increased since the 1990s. The increased pumping has resulted in as much as 25 m of water-level decline between 1990 and 2009 and as much as 270 mm of subsidence occurred duri...

Acknowlegements : Initial site installation and maintenance was funded by the CRC for Catchment Hydrology (old sites) and Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP0343778 (new sites). Ongoing site maintenance and sensor calibration (new sites) has been funded by Australian Research Council Discovery Grants DP0557543 and DP0879212. Support from...

A deep (317 m) borehole constructed with 6 piezometers was drilled adjacent to a dual-stage extensometer (under construction) near the modern San Francisco Bay shore in San Lorenzo, California for the purpose of monitoring pore-fluid pressure changes that may result from a proposed aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) program. Continuous lithological...

In 2001 a network of 18 soil moisture monitoring sites were installed across the 80,000 square km Murrumbidgee River catchment in Australia with the aim of evaluating the land surface component of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's operational weather forecasting model. Since that time the Murrumbidgee Monitoring Network (MMN) has evolved to in...

Sophisticated land surface models can now run globally at high resolutions on inexpensive computing platforms. The accuracy of their output is limited by the quality of the input data used to parameterize and force the models, the model developers' understanding of the physics involved, and the simplifications necessary to depict the Earth system e...

Early results from the GRACE satellite mission are providing novel assessment of the global-scale terrestrial water cycle. GRACE observations of changes in total water storage also present new opportunities for model verification and data assimilation. This paper investigates the latter and identifies the primary challenges to utilizing GRACE in th...

Achieving a successful long-term strategy for sustainable water resource management of the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) requires improvement in understanding of the integrated hydrological system and assessing the impacts of land use and climate change on this system. The recent launch of a satellite mission called GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate...

Monitoring changes in the Earth's gravity field for terrestrial water storage change (soil moisture, ground water, snow etc.) is a relatively new and novel concept that has been inspired by the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite mission. GRACE will soon be providing time varying maps of the Earth's gravity. However, there has...

Achieving a successful long-term strategy for sustainable water resource management of the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) involves improving our understanding of the integrated hydrological system and assessing the impacts of land use and climate change upon this system. A methodology is currently being developed with the potential for addressing these...

The hydrogeology of the unsaturated zone plays a critical role in determining the suitability of a site for artificial recharge. Optimally, a suitable site has highly permeable soils, a capacity for horizontal flow at the aquifer boundary, a lack of impeding layers, and a thick unsaturated zone. The suitability of a site is often determined by fiel...

Dissolved helium and bromide tracers were used to evaluate trapped gas during an infiltration pond experiment. Dissolved helium preferentially partitioned into trapped gas bubbles, or other pore air, because of its low solubility in water. This produced observed helium retardation factors of as much as 12 relative to bromide. Numerical simulations...

Hydrological processes occurring throughout the earth's surface lead to temporal changes in the distribution of mass, which subsequently cause subtle changes in the earth's gravity field. The GRACE mission (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) of NASA and the German Aerospace Centre will provide global data sets of changes in earth's gravity fi...

as well as water content. The calibration requirement forces the user to invest either time in the calibration This paper describes how heat dissipation sensors, used to measure process, or invest money to have the calibration done soil water matric potential, were analyzed to develop a normalized by a commercial laboratory that will follow calibra...