3.3 Monitoring in selected current CO2 storage projects

Complex monitoring programmes have been deployed in current pilot and demo projects in order to respond to the requirements of the regulations in place, to respond to the issue of CO2 geological storage safety and to test the feasibility of using diverse geophysical, geochemical and biological methods for monitoring purposes.

Monitoring programmes implemented at demo and industrial-scale projects are restricted to most technical and cost effective monitoring methods to comply with the legal and safety requirements. Many techniques applied have been adopted from well-established systems of the oil and gas industry. In the case of pilot projects, a wide variety of monitoring tools have been developed, adapted, tested and validated at a high level. Although not all tested techniques will be used widely at industrial scale, it is very important to obtain detailed information on the application of different monitoring tools that can replace ‑ if needed ‑ a monitoring tool that did not give the expected/reliable results or that provides additional information. Furthermore, some of the demo and industrial-scale projects have been involved in research projects to gain additional information beyond the monitoring data required by the regulators.

There are still open questions regarding the use of some techniques in CO2 injection and storage monitoring and these techniques should be further investigated in order to decide on their use in this field and to specify the terms of applicability. Therefore, the future pilot and demo projects should contribute to this aspect. In addition, the list of monitoring techniques should be extended, more techniques should be tested and their feasibility investigated. Furthermore, some practical guidelines for monitoring of natural gas storages may be adapted to CO2 storage.

Several monitoring programmes from current pilot and demos are presented below, listing the techniques deployed and the results of monitoring at Sleipner, Weyburn-Midale, K12-B, In Salah and Ketzin. As shown from these monitoring programmes, the common technique used for deep monitoring, tracking the plume and leakage detection is the time-lapse seismic survey, deployed at a intervals of several years. Additional methods to time-lapse seismic were deployed in several sites, e.g. time-lapse gravimetry, seabed bathimetry and controlled source electromagnetic at Sleipner; passive seismic, electrical resistivity imaging, geochemical and soil gas surveys at Weyburn; microseimic, InSAR, groundwater monitoring, soil gas and microbiological surveys, complex wireline logging at In Salah; extensive logging at K12-B; VSP, MSP, passive seismic, geoelectrical monitoring, microbiological and geochemical monitoring at Ketzin.

 

in depth

3.3.1 Sleipner

The Sleipner CCS project, the first commercial scale CCS project, began in 1996 with the injection of the CO2 separated ...

3.3.2 Weyburn-Midale

The Weyburn CO2-enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) project is located in the Williston Basin, a geological structure extend...

3.3.3 In Salah

The In Salah Gas project in Algeria is an industrial-scale CO2 storage project that has been in operation since 2004. Th...

3.3.4 K12-B

Various monitoring tools are used for monitoring the K12-B storage complex, located in the Dutch sector of the North Sea...

3.3.5 Ketzin

The Ketzin research pilot CCS project is the first European onshore CO2 storage site. Since June 2008 food grade CO2 has...