GRIF, from the CSTJF, to catalyse the energy transition
- CO₂ capture & storage is one of the solutions being investigated by TotalEnergies and many other industries to achieve carbon neutrality.
- The Aramis R&D project aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions through CO₂ capture & storage in "depleted", i.e. empty wells.
- It is based on the GRIF software - a solution that enjoys international success – used to model facilities, evaluate a well’s CO₂ injection potential and optimize its design.
"GRIF, an acronym derived from GRaphical Interface for reliability Forecasting, is a software suite comprising 12 modules, developed by CSTJF engineers at the beginning of the 1980s. It has over 40 years’ recognized expertise, keeps pace with developments and continues to appeal," explains Maïder Estécahandy, reliability engineer in charge of the GRIF project. Today, the mathematical models created using GRIF are used in projects at TotalEnergies, in those at research institutes, and in more than 130 industrial sectors worldwide: aerospace, defense, telecommunications, health, energy, etc. GRIF has been marketed outside the Company since 2005, and over 300 licenses have been sold. It can be used to run Production Availability Studies – PAS. "GRIF is a powerful tool able to incorporate hundreds of items of data and to process extremely complex models to optimize production, safety, costs and carbon footprints. That’s why we have decided to use it in Aramis, the CO₂ sequestration project, to assess performances using a PAS study," Maïder Estécahandy continues. In 2016, GRIF was connected to PANGEA, the supercomputer at the CSTJF. "Since then, the calculations which took several days using a standard PC, are processed in just a few minutes".
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Climate ambition: to achieve net zero by 2050
CO₂ capture & storage is one of the solutions being investigated by TotalEnergies and many other industries to help achieve net zero, i.e. to no longer produce more greenhouses gases than we are able to neutralize. What is the principle behind the solution? To capture the CO₂ produced, transport it to depleted offshore gas fields, and store it. That’s the purpose of the Aramis project, for which an initial availability study was performed in 2021 using the GRIF Petri module, a graphics and mathematical tool used to model the behavior of complex industrial systems. An injection optimization algorithm was created, based on data including the status of equipment, the quantity of CO₂ in the storage tanks and the arrival of the next vessel, the (liquid or gaseous) CO₂ concentration, the reservoir pressure, the volume already injected, the temperature, etc. The model was updated every hour to assess the injected volume. Thanks to the power of PANGEA, the computing time for each hourly update is no longer than 10 minutes for over 10,000 simulations. "This study validated the fact that the GRIF methodology, used up to now to perform availability studies in the fossil energies sector, is also pertinent in the analysis of CO₂ storage systems, and for all the energy transition projects (winds, solar, etc.)," Maïder Estécahandy concludes.
TotalEnergies, Shell Netherlands, Energie Beheer Nederland (EBN) and Gasuni formed a partnership to create the Aramis project and enable large-scale CO₂-reduction for industrial clusters in the Netherlands, and CO₂ storage in depleted reservoirs in the North Sea. The facilities should be up and running by 2026.
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