• Economic and Environmental Geology
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• v.53 no.1
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• pp.23-32
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• 2020

Geological CO₂ sequestration is a global warming response technology to limit atmospheric emissions by injecting CO₂ captured on a large scale into deep geological formations. The presented results concern mineralogical and hydrogeological investigations (FE-SEM, XRD, XRF, and MICP) of mudstone samples from drilling cores of the Pohang basin, which is the research area for the first demonstration-scale CO₂ storage project in Korea. They aim to identify the mineral properties of the mudstone constituting the caprock and to quantitatively evaluate the hydrogeologic sealing capacity that directly affects the stability and reliability of geological CO₂ storage. Mineralogical analysis showed that the mudstone samples are mainly composed of quartz, K-feldspar, plagioclase and a small amount of pyrite, calcite, clay minerals, etc. Mercury intrusion capillary pressure analysis also showed that the samples generally had uniform particle configurations and pore distribution and there was no distinct correlation between the estimated porosity and air permeability. The allowable CO₂ column heights based on the estimated pore-entry pressures and breakthrough pressures were found to be significantly higher than the thickness of the targeting CO₂ injection layer. These results showed that the mudstone layers in the Yeongil group, Pohang basin, Korea have sufficient sealing capacity to suppress the leakage of CO₂ injected during the demonstration-scale CO₂ storage project. It should be noticed, however, that the applicability of results and analyses in this study is limited by the lack of available samples. For rigorous assessment of the sealing efficiency for geological CO₂ storage operations, significant efforts on collection and multi-aspect evaluation for core samples over entire caprock formations should be accompanied.

• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.38 no.1
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• pp.24-34
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• 2017

The westerly waves generation is described in the advanced earth science textbook used at high school as follows: as westerly wind approaches and blows over large mountains, the air flow shows wave motions in downwind side, which can be explained by the conservation of potential vorticity. However, there has been no case study showing the phenomena of the mesoscale westerly waves with observational data in the area of small mountains in Korea. And thus the wind speed and time persistency of westerly winds along with the width and length of mountains have never been studied to explain the generation of the westerly waves. As a first step, we assured the westerly waves generated in the downwind side of Sobaek mountains based on surface station wind data nearby. Furthermore, the critical or minimum wind velocity of the westerly wind over Sobaek mountains to generate the downwind wave were derived and calcuated tobe about $0.6m\;s^{-1}$ for Sobaek mountains, which means that the westerly waves could be generated in most cases of westerly blowing over the mountains. Using surface station data and 4-dimensional assimilation data of RDAPS (Regional Data Assimilation and Prediction System) provided by Korea Meteorological Agency, we also analyzed cases of westerly waves occurrence and life cycle in the downwind side of Sobaek mountains for a year of 2014. The westerly waves occurred in meso-${\beta}$ or -${\gamma}$ scales. The westerly waves generated by the mountains disappeared gradually with wind speed decreasing. The occurrence frequency of the vorticity with meso-${\beta}$ scale got to be higher when the stronger westerly wind blew. When we extended the spatial range of the analysis, phenomena of westerly waves were also observed in the downwind side of Yensan mountains in Northeastern China. Our current work will be a study material to help students understand the atmospheric phenomena perturbed by mountains.