Siting CO₂ Storage in MENA Carbonate–Evaporite Systems

Geological storage of CO₂ is the component of carbon capture on which everything else depends, and national operators in the region have announced some of the world's largest ambitions: 14 Mtpa by 2035 in Saudi Arabia, anchored by the Jubail hub, and 43.5 Mtpa by 2050 in the UAE. Yet the site-assessment frameworks a regional regulator would naturally reach for were built on North Sea and North American sandstone experience. The region must instead qualify sites in carbonate-evaporite systems: heterogeneous carbonate platforms sealed by anhydrite and halite, saturated with hot hypersaline brines, and densely penetrated by legacy wells. Geologic® prepared a review of that mismatch.

The review anatomizes the five generic frameworks stage by stage and shows they share a single calibration provenance; synthesises the storage science of carbonate-evaporite systems across seals, reservoirs, geochemistry, and wells into a twelve-item challenge inventory; and collates the documented MENA record, from the operating injections at Al Reyadah, Uthmaniyah, and Ras Laffan to the Abu Dhabi saline-aquifer programme and Oman's store selection. The collation shows regional practitioners already rebuilding rather than applying the generic recipes. A proposed eight-stage MENA-oriented screening protocol, not yet validated and not yet applied to a real site, makes that adaptation explicit and citable: every criterion traces to documented evidence, every gate states what would satisfy it, and the validation pathway is named.