Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration—Validation Phase
Project # 42591

Primary Performing Organization:
New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology

The Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration (SWP) is one of the seven Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnerships created by DOE in 2003 as part of its program to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.  After two years of fact finding across the United States, the Partnerships are now engaged in individual carbon sequestration validation projects.  Each Partnership project is distinct in its geology, land use, and population base.  The SWP is led by the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology and includes technical and industry partners from all states in the Southwest region, including Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Utah, and parts of Kansas, Texas, and Wyoming (see the Partnership map on this site).  SWP’s suite of validation projects make up a four-year effort devoted to validating promising carbon dioxide (CO₂) sequestration opportunities within the Southwest region.

Ongoing investigations reveal that the region’s geologic reservoirs offer significant potential sequestration opportunities, including:

• Deep saline formations: over 88 billion metric tons of CO₂ capacity.
• Abandoned and depleted oil and natural gas reservoirs: over 21 billion metric tons of CO₂ capacity.
• Coal seams: almost a billion metric tons of CO₂ capacity.

Objectives of the Phase II validation program include:

• Conduct five field pilot tests to validate the most promising sequestration technologies and concepts, including three geologic pilot tests and two terrestrial pilot programs.
• Develop risk mitigation procedures for the sequestration tests.
• Optimize MVA - monitoring, verification, and accounting - protocols.
• Reach out to the general public, and educate all stakeholders about CCS and the SWP’s efforts

The data generated by the field tests will be valuable to future commercial-scale sequestration projects in the Southwest.