Review of Formation Damage Assessment for CO2 Injection and Storage

Abstract

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has become an essential strategy for reducing CO2 emissions, with injection and storage projects increasingly implemented around the world. However, the long-term effectiveness of geological storage depends on maintaining injectivity and reservoir integrity, both of which face challenges from various formation damage mechanisms that are specific to CO2 injection. First, this review covers recent advances in understanding the physical, chemical, thermal, and biological processes that cause permeability loss, including salt precipitation from brine drying, fines migration, hydrate and ice formation due to Joule-Thomson cooling, acid-induced mineral dissolution, clay swelling, asphaltene precipitation, microbial activity, and phase trapping. The second part of this paper provides an in-depth review of assessment techniques used to diagnose and predict formation damage such as experimental methods, numerical simulations, analytical techniques, machine learning, and molecular modeling. Despite significant progress, many uncertainties remain regarding how these mechanisms interact over operational time scales and under real-world reservoir conditions. Future research should focus on integrating experimental and numerical approaches, expanding studies across different lithologies, and developing advanced in situ monitoring methods to improve the risk assessment and manage injectivity more effectively. Overcoming these challenges is crucial for enabling safe, efficient, and scalable deployment of CO2 storage technologies, with particular emphasis on conducting long-term studies that capture the coupled processes and reservoir responses over extended operational time scales.