Abstract

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (Public Law 110-140) authorized the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to conduct a national assessment of geologic storage resources for carbon dioxide (CO₂), requiring estimation of hydrocarbon-in-place volumes and formation volume factors for all the oil, gas, and gas-condensate reservoirs within the U.S. sedimentary basins. The procedures to calculate in-place volumes for oil and gas reservoirs have already been presented by Verma and Bird (2005) to help with the USGS assessment of the undiscovered resources in the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska, but there is no straightforward procedure available for calculating in-place volumes for gas-condensate reservoirs for the carbon sequestration project. The objective of the present study is to propose a simple procedure for calculating the hydrocarbon-in-place volume of a condensate reservoir to help estimate the hydrocarbon pore volume for potential CO₂ sequestration.

First posted March 21, 2012