Field work in Ravenglass Estuary

The objective of the DeepReservoir project is to understand the controls on where grain coats of the mineral chlorite forms in sandstone reservoirs. Such chlorite grain coats preserve reservoir properties in deeply buried reservoirs, and rapidly react with CO2 to form immobile calcite mineralization. This makes chlorite grain coats very important both for hydrocarbon exploration and CO2 storage, but currently the distribution and geometries of chlorite-coated zones in the subsurface is unknown to science. To better understand how to predict and handle chlorite in the subsurface, the DeepReservoir project will study chlorite coated sands and sandstones in modern systems and in ancient systems both at outcrop and in the subsurface. The Ravenglass estuary has little human modification and large amounts of chlorite and other iron-rich minerals and has been studied by the University of Liverpool for two decades. Understanding the Ravenglass estuary will be important to better understand the data that will be acquired through the DeepReservoir from Jurassic systems in East Greenland and offshore in the Norwegian Sea