Odike’s research integrates process safety into geologic carbon storage

Modern carbon capture and storage (CCS) policy has converged on a simple idea: keeping injection pressures below critical limits ensures safe storage.

Most regulatory frameworks and project designs emphasise maintaining pressures below fracture gradients and caprock integrity thresholds. This emphasis is logical, necessary and scientifically grounded. However, it is also incomplete because underground carbon storage is not a reversible process. It is a large-scale, long-term process designed to permanently isolate industrial carbon dioxide (CO₂) streams from the atmosphere, often for centuries. Once injection begins, the subsurface is no longer a passive geological formation; it becomes an engineered system whose behaviour evolves. In such systems, safety evaluation demands attention to more than a single operating parameter.

This challenge sits at the centre of Bright Eyindah Odike’s doctoral research. A Chemical Engineering PhD student at Texas A&M University, Odike studies the application of process safety and risk assessment principles to geological carbon storage, particularly in deep saline aquifers. His work focuses on understanding storage not merely as a pressure management problem, but as a dynamic, risk-evolving system.

In the United States, the EPA’s Class VI Underground Injection Control regulations appropriately place strong emphasis on pressure management. Operators must demonstrate that injection will not fracture confining units, endanger underground sources of drinking water or compromise containment integrity. These requirements are foundational. However, pressure limits alone do not define risk; they constrain only one dimension of it.

To manage pressure build-up, many CCS projects are now exploring periodic injection strategies, which involve modulating injection schedules to allow pressure dissipation. On paper, this approach aligns well with Class VI objectives by lowering peak pressures, reducing geomechanical stress and improving injectivity. As a result, pressure-managed injection is sometimes framed as inherently safer.

This framing warrants closer examination because periodic injection does not eliminate pressure-driven risk; it transforms it. Instead of steady or slowly varying pressure fields, this injection pattern subjects the subsurface to transient pressure gradients. These fluctuations can intermittently mobilise CO₂ and brine, alter flow pathways and interact with existing wells, faults and geological heterogeneities in ways that steady-state or quasi-steady analyses may not capture. In process safety engineering, managing one hazard often involves trade-offs, and reducing one risk may contribute to the emergence of another.

Odike notes that pressure management is necessary, but it is not a complete or standalone guarantee of safety. For permanent underground storage, it is essential to understand how pressure changes interact with potential containment pathways over time, not simply whether pressure remains below a defined limit.

Process safety engineering has long recognised a fundamental principle: control does not equal assurance. In refineries, chemical plants and pipeline systems, no single variable defines safety. Rather, safety emerges from understanding system interactions, failure modes, uncertainties and long-term degradation mechanisms. Geological carbon storage deserves the same level of analytical rigour.

Robust risk assessment frameworks for carbon storage must account for transient behaviour, uncertainty, coupled flow and transport processes, and the long-term evolution of the storage system itself. As a next step for the CCS community, Odike recommends that operators explicitly integrate risk-informed, systems-level thinking into the evaluation of injection strategies to achieve not only technically feasible but demonstrably safe long-term carbon storage.

Background

Bright Eyindah Odike is a PhD student in Chemical Engineering and a Doctoral Researcher at the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center (MKOPSC) at Texas A&M University. With a diverse academic and research background in petroleum and chemical engineering, his current research focuses on the application of coupled physics-based and deep learning computational frameworks for the safety-centric development of subsurface energy and carbon storage systems.

He holds a master’s degree in Energy and Mineral Engineering, with a minor in Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering, from Pennsylvania State University. His research there focused on integrating advanced data-driven and analytical modelling techniques for the development and performance evaluation of multiphase natural gas reservoirs. He graduated top of his class with a bachelor’s degree in Petroleum Engineering from Rivers State University.