Designs for Risk Evaluation and Management

The Designs for Risk Evaluation and Management (DREAM) tool was developed as part of the effort to quantify the risk of geologic storage of carbon dioxide (CO₂) under the U.S. Department of Energy's National Risk Assessment Partnership (NRAP). DREAM is an optimization tool created to identify optimal monitoring schemes that minimize the time to first detection of CO₂ leakage from a subsurface storage formation. DREAM acts as a post-processer on user-provided output from subsurface leakage simulations. While DREAM was developed for CO₂ leakage scenarios, it is applicable to any subsurface leakage simulation of the same output format. The DREAM tool is comprised of three main components: (1) a Java wizard used to configure and execute the simulations, (2) a visualization tool to view the domain space and optimization results, and (3) a plotting tool used to analyze the results. A secondary Java application is provided to aid users in converting common American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) output data to the standard DREAM hierarchical data format (HDF5). DREAM employs a simulated annealing approach that searches the solution space by iteratively mutating potential monitoring schemes built of various configurations of monitoring locations and leak detection parameters. This approach has proven to be orders of magnitude faster than an exhaustive search of the entire solution space. The user's manual illustrates the program graphical user interface (GUI), describes the tool inputs, and includes an example application.