The growing importance of subsurface carbon storage for tackling anthropogenic carbon emissions requires new ideas to improve the rate and cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS) project development and implementation. We assessed sandstones from the UK Geoenergy Observatories (UKGEOS) site in Glasgow, UK and the Wilmslow Sandstone Formation (WSF) in Cumbria, UK at the pore scale to indicate suitability for further assessment as CCS reservoirs. We measured porosity, permeability and other pore geometry characteristics using digital rock physics techniques on microcomputed tomographic images of core material from each site. We found the Glasgow material to be unsuitable for CCS due to very low porosity (up to 1.65%), whereas the WSF material showed connected porosity up to 26.3% and permeabilities up to 6040 mD. Our results support the presence of a percolation threshold at 10% total porosity, introducing near full connectivity. We found total porosity varies with permeability with an exponent of 3.19. This provides a reason to assume near full connectivity in sedimentary samples showing porosities above this threshold without the need for expensive and time-consuming analyses.

Supplementary material: Information about the boreholes sampled in this study, additional well logs of boreholes and a summary of the supporting data plotted throughout this article from literature are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5260074

Thematic collection: This article is part of the Geoscience for CO₂ storage collection available at: https://www.lyellcollection.org/cc/geoscience-for-co2-storage

地下碳存储在应对人为碳排放方面的重要性日益提高，因此需要新的想法来提高碳捕集与封存（CCS）项目开发和实施的速度和成本。我们评估了英国格拉斯哥的英国地质能观测站（UKGEOS）站点和英国坎布里亚郡的威姆斯洛砂岩地层（WSF）的孔隙度，以表明是否适合作为CCS储层进行进一步评估。我们使用数字岩石物理学技术，对每个位置的核心材料的计算机断层扫描图像进行了测量，从而测量了孔隙度，渗透率和其他孔隙几何特征。我们发现，由于孔隙率非常低（高达1.65％），格拉斯哥材料不适合CCS，而WSF材料的连通孔隙率高达26.3％，渗透率高达6040 mD。我们的结果支持在总孔隙度为10％时存在渗透阈值，从而引入近乎完全的连通性。我们发现总孔隙度随渗透率变化，指数为3.19。这提供了一个假设，可在孔隙度高于此阈值的沉积样品中假设几乎完全连通，而无需进行昂贵且费时的分析。

补充材料： https : //doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5260074提供了有关本研究中所采样的钻孔的信息，其他钻孔的测井记录以及本文中从文献中得出的支持数据的摘要。

专题收集：本文是可用于以下位置的Geoscience for CO ₂储存集合的一部分：https://www.lyellcollection.org/cc/geoscience-for-co2-storage