The overall objective of this project is to obtain the first rigorous assessment of the amount and extent of local capillary trapping expected to occur in typical storage formations. The University of Texas Austin is gathering variogram models typical of CO₂ storage formations and generating a large number of geostatistical realizations of permeability from these models. The realizations are being populated with key petrophysical properties using crossproperty correlations and the spatial properties of the resulting model formations are being analyzed to determine the potential for local capillary trapping. The emplacement and buoyancy-driven migration of CO₂ and the onset of a leakage path in the overlying seal is being simulated and the simulation was analyzed to determine the extent of filling of the local capillary traps and the degree of immobilization within them. Final-scale CO₂ saturation distributions were extracted from the simulations and bench-scale buoyant displacements in heterogeneous 2D sand packs were performed.