Capture and storage of CO2 beneath the sea floor is an important strategy in the struggle to reduce the amount of the climate gas in the atmosphere. A new project sets to see how safe such storage is.
Text: Maja Sojtaric
CAGE is participating in a project that will conduct a first of a kind, deep-water experiment on controlled release of CO2 from a submerged carbon dioxide storage reservoir.
Small quantities of CO₂ will be injected into mud on the sea floor in the North Sea, 100km North East of Aberdeen. This site is in the vicinity of a depleted gas field and is a typical location that could be used for carbon dioxide storage.
Part of Horizon 2020
The experiment will take place in 2018, as a part of a €16M collaborative project led by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton, UK: Strategies for Environmental Monitoring of Marine Carbon Capture and Storage (STEMM CCS). It is funded through EU´s Horizon 2020 programme.
The project will enable scientists to develop a system for detecting and quantifying the volume of any CO₂ released. This work will help provide greater reassurance around the safety of carbon capture and storage operations in the future.
CAGE contributes with seismic studies
CAGE is contributing to Work Package 3, which uses new geophysical techniques, sediment imaging techniques and direct sampling to determine the efficiency of fluid (gas and water) pathways in the shallow sub-surface.
“We will contribute our unique 4D time-lapse seismic studies of active fluid leakage systems on the West-Svalbard margin to the project.” says Stefan Bünz, associate professor at CAGE at UiT The Arctic University of Norway.
The work package will focus on anomalies in seismic data (‘chimney structures’), common in many sedimentary basins, which are generally believed to be the result of hydro-fracturing and fluid migration.
