Southern Adriatic site, Italy
Characterisation of a carbonate aquifer in the Southern Adriatic Sea
The Southern Adriatic site consists of a structural trap in a carbonate saline aquifer, close to the main Italian CO2 emission power plant (Federico II power plant in Brindisi) where the energy company Enel has launched a pilot plant for CO2 capture in March 2011. The caprock-reservoir system of the Southern Adriatic site is located in the foreland of the Apennines-Dinarides orogenic belts. The reservoir formation consists of mudstone and wackstone-like limestones, “Scaglia formation” (middle-upper Cretaceous), located at 1000 -2000 m depth. It is overlaid by a few hundred meters of marls , Biscaro Formation (lower-midlle Miocene) and clays (Plio-Pleistocene).
The research consists in building a 3D geological model at reservoir scale that will be enriched with faults, petrophysical and mechanical properties concerning the overall structure (reservoir, the "sideburden" and the "overburden"). This will be the input for the modelling phase, where it will be estimated the pressure variation induced by the CO2 injection and the related surface displacement (up-lift or down-lift). The simulations will help to understand the effect that fracture systems may have on CO2 flow during storage in a naturally-fractured reservoir, such as the Italian site.