THE SITE WELL CATALOG: II. IDENTIFYING REQUIREMENTS AND ESTABLISHING DESIGN CRITERIA

Characterizing, selecting and permitting a geological carbon sequestration site requires assembling, vetting and managing a large, diverse borehole dataset. Multiple stakeholders need these data to construct site geologic/hydrologic models, perform risk assessments, establish operating plans and prepare/evaluate permit applications. Borehole data, hosted by governmental agencies with different levels of public access, are archived in various formats and forms with little standardization or metadata. Borehole data from multiple sources assembled into a single well catalog ensures data relevance, integrity and currency for stakeholders. Data management needs to be the responsibility of a dedicated team, allowing others to concentrate on data manipulation and analysis. Four factors complicate designing a site well catalog: identifying data types needed for permitting, the diverse nature of these data, managing the resultant massive dataset and the combination of spatial and non-spatial borehole data. Large amounts of data are often managed using relational databases. These applications provide mechanisms for ensuring data integrity by eliminating data duplication and minimizing fragmentation, allowing use of forms for data entry and editing, and viewing site dataset subsets via queries. In addition, they can store binary objects, e.g. scanned documents, photographs, etc. Inexpensive (Microsoft Access) or free (MySQL) databases are available to manage the large borehole datasets encountered in a site selection process. Although ideal for managing the non-spatial borehole data, relational databases lack the visual interface necessary displaying and analyzing spatial data. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software can handle borehole spatial data, but are inadequate for the other types of data. To overcome the limitations of both applications independently, well catalogs for sequestration sites in SW Wyoming are being created by merging a relational database (Access) with a GIS platform (ArcGIS) through a custom interface. In addition, procedures are being developed and tested to mine borehole data from state agency Web sites and populate the Access database. From Access, tables with spatial information are imported into the GIS platform for mapping and visual display.