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Use of relational databases to evaluate regional petroleum accumulation, groundwater flow, and CO₂ sequestration in Kansas

¹ Kansas Geological Survey, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66047; tcarr{at}kgs.ku.edu
² Kansas Geological Survey, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66047; dmerriam{at}kgs.ku.edu
³ Kansas Geological Survey, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66047; jbartley{at}kgs.ku.edu

Timothy Carr is codirector University of Kansas Energy Research Center and chief of the Energy Research Section of the Kansas Geological Survey. He worked for 13 years with ARCO Oil and Gas as a research and exploration geologist. Tim is program manager and team member of several projects, including the creation of a distributed national database on carbon sequestration and value-added sequestration. Recent interests include subsurface geology and geophysics, environmental geology, energy systems, and developing information systems to access and analyze energy and environmental information.Dan Merriam, a senior research scientist (emeritus) with the Kansas Geological Survey, was an exploration geologist with Union Oil Company of California in the Rocky Mountains and west Texas. He joined the Kansas Geological Survey in 1953 and subsequently was on the faculty at Syracuse University, Wichita State University, and Emporia State University prior to rejoining the Kansas Geological Survey in 1991. His Geologic History of Kansas has been a standard reference for the past four decades. His recent interests include geothermics and structural development of cratonic basins in the Continental Interior.

Jeremy Bartley received his B.S. degree in geography (1999) from the University of Kansas. His current position is the assistant geographic information systems (GIS) coordinator and geoinformatics project leader for the Kansas Geological Survey. He is currently the coprincipal investigator and technical lead for creating a distributed national database on carbon sequestration. He has worked actively with GIS for the last 9 years. His present research interests are in the areas of data discovery and search techniques, integration of distributed databases, spatial-temporal analysis, enterprise GIS, and the development of the field of geoinformatics.

Large-scale relational databases and geographic information system tools are used to integrate temperature, pressure, and water geochemistry data from numerous wells to better understand regional-scale geothermal and hydrogeological regimes of the lower Paleozoic aquifer systems in the mid-continent and to evaluate their potential for geologic CO₂ sequestration. The lower Paleozoic (Cambrian to Mississippian) aquifer systems in Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma comprise one of the largest regional-scale saline aquifer systems in North America. Understanding hydrologic conditions and processes of these regional-scale aquifer systems provides insight to the evolution of the various sedimentary basins, migration of hydrocarbons out of the Anadarko and Arkoma basins, and the distribution of Arbuckle petroleum reservoirs across Kansas and provides a basis to evaluate CO₂ sequestration potential. The Cambrian and Ordovician stratigraphic units form a saline aquifer that is in hydrologic continuity with the freshwater recharge from the Ozark plateau and along the Nemaha anticline. The hydrologic continuity with areas of freshwater recharge provides an explanation for the apparent underpressure in the Arbuckle Group.