Carbon capture, use, and storage (CCUS) places injectivity at the center of formation evaluation, elevating it from a secondary operational concern to a primary determinant of storage feasibility and performance. CO2 injection activates a set of tightly coupled processes, including rock/fluid interaction, nonisothermal flow behavior, and rate‑dependent pore‑scale alteration, that can rapidly reshape near‑well and reservoir‑scale flow capacity. Understanding how these processes interact is critical to defining safe and sustainable injection envelopes.
Formation damage under CO2-specific conditions remains a central uncertainty. Paper SPE 230571 presents a comprehensive laboratory workflow that combines static exposure, dynamic coreflooding, and multiscale characterization to isolate damage mechanisms activated by CO2/brine/rock interaction. The results demonstrate strongly lithology‑dependent responses: Carbonate samples exhibited permeability increases driven by localized dissolution and wormhole development, whereas sandstones experienced injectivity impairment owing to CO2-triggered clay fines mobilization and pore‑throat blockage. The work highlights the need for formation evaluation workflows that explicitly test CO2 compatibility rather than relying on routine or special core analysis alone.
Thermal effects introduce an additional, rate‑sensitive control on injectivity. Paper SPE 230576 presents an analytical model for nonisothermal CO2 injection that couples Joule-Thomson cooling with unsteady heat exchange between the reservoir and adjacent formations. By initiating heat exchange at the arrival of the temperature front, the model provides improved predictions of evolving temperature and pressure profiles and enables rapid screening of hydrate‑formation risk using pressure/temperature trajectories. The framework demonstrates how thermal transients can define upper injection‑rate limits and influence where cooling‑related impairment may occur relative to the injection well.
Field‑scale injectivity and containment assessment are further advanced in paper SPE 230941, which presents an integrated, in‑situ formation evaluation workflow applied to dedicated CCUS wells in the Middle East. Using modular formation-testing technologies, the study combines pressure‑while‑drilling measurements, formation-fluid sampling, and extensive microfrac stress testing across both reservoir and caprock intervals to directly quantify injectivity, minimum horizontal stress, and sealing capacity. The results demonstrate that caprock integrity and injectivity cannot be inferred from petrophysical data alone; instead, they require dynamic stress measurements and real‑time geomechanical model updates. By resolving stress heterogeneity, fracture-initiation thresholds, and pressure limits across several thousand feet of section, the workflow establishes operationally relevant injection envelopes that explicitly balance injectivity against containment risk.
Together, these contributions point toward a practical direction for CCUS formation evaluation: the integration of CO2‑specific laboratory testing, physics‑based and physics‑assisted modeling, and in‑situ measurements to anticipate injectivity evolution, constrain injection limits, and reduce long‑term storage risk.
Summarized Papers in This August 2026 Issue
SPE 230571 Laboratory Study Focuses on Formation-Damage Concerns With CO2 Injection for Carbon Storage by Melissa J. Martin, SPE, Stephen Drylie, SPE, and Jonathan Antia, SPE, Core Laboratories, et al.
SPE 230576 CO2 Injection Model Accounts for Joule-Thomson Cooling, Heat Exchange by Christina Chesnokov, SPE, University of Adelaide; Rouhi Farajzadeh, SPE, Shell and Delft University of Technology; and Konstantin M. Fedorov, SPE, University of Tyumen, et al.
SPE 230941 Blueprint Established for Dynamic Reservoir Assessment in CCUS Projects by Mahmut Sarili, SPE, and Adam Donald, SLB, and Aurifullah Vantala, ADNOC, et al.
Recommended Additional Reading
SPE 230433 Geomechanical Evaluation for Caprock Integrity by Florian Karpfinger, SLB, et al.
OTC 36911 A Different Approach To Evaluate Dynamic Compatibility in Rock/scCO2/Brine Systems by G. Herrera, Intertek Westport Technology Center, et al.
SPE CCUS 2026 4432610 Geomechanical Alterations of Reservoir and Crystalline Rocks Under Supercritical CO2 Injection: Insights for Reservoir Management and Energy Generation by Francisca Noija, Texas A&M University, et al.
Peyman Moradi, SPE, is a research scientist at Baker Hughes. He holds a PhD degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Calgary and has completed postdoctoral research at both the University of Calgary and The University of Texas at Austin. With more than 10 years of experience in the upstream sector, Moradi has worked as a reservoir engineer and scientific programmer for leading organizations including ExxonMobil, Tenaris, Xecta, ESG Solutions, and Petropars. His research interests include fiber-optic distributed acoustic and distributed temperature sensing monitoring and diagnostics, well-testing analysis, formation evaluation, microseismic analysis, and well-design solutions. Moradi has published more than 50 papers and served as a technical reviewer for several journals and SPE conferences. He is also an active volunteer with SPE, serving as a judge for SPE Student Paper Contests and Section Awards and serving on committees for the Unconventional Resources Technical Conference and the SPE Western Regional Meeting.