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Figure 1: Browse Basin and sub-basins
and areas being considered for potential
greenhouse gas storage
© Geoscience Australia

As part of the National CO₂ Infrastructure Plan (NCIP), the Browse Basin CO₂ Storage Project is acquiring, interpreting and integrating new and existing pre-competitive data to assess the prospectivity of the Browse Basin for the geological storage of CO₂, and to define potential GHG storage areas in the region.

The Browse Basin is a northeast-trending depocentre situated entirely offshore in the Timor Sea region of Australia’s North West Shelf (Figure 1). It covers an area of approximately 140,000 km² and contains in excess of 15 km of Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic sedimentary section. The Browse Basin hosts significant reserves of gas and condensate (Figure 1) and a large proportion of the basin is covered by petroleum permits. Initial assessment undertaken by the Carbon Storage Taskforce (CST) indicated that the Browse Basin has significant potential with the capacity to store more than 7 GT of CO₂ (Carbon Storage Taskforce 2009). The CST assessment has shown that a detailed study of this basin is required to underpin any future GHG acreage release in this area. This study will be undertaken by the section in 2012-15 as part of an integrated study into the resource potential of the basin.

The project will comprise an initial phase that will identify the CO₂ storage related issues in the area and determine data acquisition needs to assess these issues. The second phase will involve acquiring and processing the data identified in Phase 1, including geological, geophysical and marine environmental data. The third phase of the project will focus on integration of the existing and newly acquired data into a full multidisciplinary assessment of the basin for geological storage of CO₂.

The project is expected to deliver the following outputs:

• Detailed review of the Browse Basin geological CO₂ storage capacity and containment risks
• New geological, geophysical and marine environmental data underpinning the CO₂ storage capacity assessments
• Geological interpretation of all available datasets resulting in defining reservoir/seal geometries and their geomechanical properties
• Reservoir-scale and detailed dynamic models predicting behaviour of the CO₂ plume over time
• Papers and reports documenting the datasets and results of the assessments.

Evaluation of the potential CO₂ storage capacity and containment risks in the Browse Basin may assist in selection of the CO₂ injection sites in this offshore region.