Background to the Study

We were very pleased to hold our 10th Monitoring Network meeting at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California on 10-12 June. The venue provided great views over San Francisco bay area, which complemented the technical programme of presentations and discussions inside.

The 45 presentations and 17 posters covered a range of topics, with sessions on cost-effective monitoring of large projects, permit requirements, induced seismicity, shallow monitoring, geophysical monitoring and CO₂relationships, pressure monitoring applications, monitoring tools for shallow, surface and deep monitoring, update on projects, and post-closure monitoring. As well as the new results and developments, new at this meeting was a group-work exercise created by Sue Hovorka of the University of Texas. This involved the groups designing monitoring plans for fictional but realistic storage sites, and then these being actually tested with leakage scenarios. The groups were able to apply what they had learnt in the meeting as well as their own expertise, and I’m pleased to say that all the monitoring plans ‘caught’ the various leakage scenarios!

Summary

Also of particular note were the international research collaborations being created around the Aquistore storage site in Saskatchewan and around the CMC controlled release in overburden being developed in Alberta. The Aquistore project has just started injecting CO₂ captured from the Boundary Dam coal power station into a deep saline formation, some 7,000 tonnes injected so far. PTRC has monitoring research collaborations with 26 organisations from 7 countries at this ‘field laboratory’, and the first monitoring data was shared at this meeting from downhole pressure, seismic, and pulsed-neutron logging measurements.

The overall conclusions of the meeting included identifying the value of pressure based monitoring for assessing reservoir behaviour and in the overburden for leak detection, the potential in fibre-optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and permanent sources, the benefits of good engagement with regulators, the importance of geomechanical analysis using the monitoring data, and the feasibility of offshore monitoring for leak detection and quantification.

Overall, a meeting packed with new developments in all aspects of monitoring CO₂ storage, shared and discussed by this group of leading international experts. Monitoring continues to make great advances.