Measurement, Monitoring and Verification of CO₂ storage

This project was a collaboration between several institutes which worked to develop a marine monitoring system for underwater CCS sites.

Although there are existing technological applications which can detect carbon dioxide in a marine environment, there is a lack of integrated, cost-effective and commercially available systems which can reliably record and report anomalies in the level of carbon dioxide above a large store. The need to introduce capability for the robust monitoring of underground carbon dioxide storage sites is in response to legislation by the European Union on CO₂ storage. 

Current research and evidence shows that leakage is highly unlikely, however if a leak were to occur it is difficult to predict with certainty where it would reach the seabed. As a part of this project outputs from PML model based applications were used to characterise with high precision the expected environmental characteristics of a leak from a CCS site in order to produce economically efficient design and monitoring strategies for CCS sites.