A new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy will allow an interdisciplinary team of UW scientists to further study how injecting CO2 into the Rock Springs Uplift would affect underground conditions.

According to a news release, the $1.1 million grant began on Oct. 1 and will help fund a three-year research project to predict changes in the subsurface during and after injection of CO2. Research has shown that two deep saline aquifers in Sweetwater County’s Rock Springs Uplift could store 26 billion tons of CO2 over 50 years as part of a future carbon capture and storage operation.

“The goal of this research is to improve our understanding of the geomechanical effect of CO2 injection on two types of reservoir rocks, sandstone and limestone/dolomite,” says John Kaszuba, associate professor in UW’s Department of Geology and Geophysics and the School of Energy Resources (SER). “The ability to predict geomechanical behavior in response to CO2 injection, if successful, could increase the accuracy of subsurface models that predict the integrity of the storage reservoir.”

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