Brief description of the project

ARMISTICE combines carbon capture and storage (CCS) and exploitation of supercritical geothermal systems (SCGS), creating the necessary economic value in CCS that will reduce the impact on climate change and contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals “Affordable And Clean Energy” and “Climate Action”. ARMISTICE will positively contribute to the societal challenges of producing CO2-negative, clean and renewable energy to tackle climate change by exploring the most suitable conditions to exploit combined CCS-SCGS. The objectives are to: i) maximize carbon-free energy production; ii) maximize storage of CO2; iii) minimize risks of CO2 leaks and iv) minimize the risks of inducing large earthquakes. The research aims at providing suitable balanced conditions between risks and rewards in CCS-SCGS projects.

The research methodology followed in ARMISTICE provides the answer to scientific questions associated with i) multi-phase and multi-component H2O-CO2 flow in supercritical geothermal systems to analyse the feasibility of CCS-SCGS combination (WP1) and ii) the role played by faults and discontinuities in CCS-SCGS systems in inducing earthquakes (WP2).

The impact of ARMISTICE is expected to go beyond current state-of-the-art understanding of supercritical geothermal systems by providing precious insight on multiphase and multi-component flow in high-temperature reservoirs and their effect on mechanical stability. ARMISTICE will advance the understanding of processes that may induce seismicity in reservoirs, a necessary step to predict and control the occurrence of damaging earthquakes. ARMISTICE will provide computational methods and results useful to tackle questions not only related to geoengineering application, but also to geoscientific problems such as magmatic fluids flow, dike propagation, volcano-seismicity and instabilities.

The relative advantage of injecting CO2 vs H2O in CCS-SCGS is a function of the price of storing CO2 vs. the price of electricity. For high-permeability systems, water works better than CO2; the latter is advantageous for lower- permeability and temperature and for high porosity.