Abstract

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a key technology to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from industrial processes in a feasible, substantial, and timely manner. For geological CO2 storage to be safe, reliable, and accepted by society, robust strategies for CO2 leakage detection, quantification and management are crucial. The STEMM-CCS (Strategies for Environmental Monitoring of Marine Carbon Capture and Storage) project aimed to provide techniques and understanding to enable and inform cost-effective monitoring of CCS sites in the marine environment. A controlled CO2 release experiment was carried out in the central North Sea, designed to mimic an unintended emission of CO2 from a subsurface CO2 storage site to the seafloor. A total of 675 kg of CO2 were released into the shallow sediments (∼3 m below seafloor), at flow rates between 6 and 143 kg/d. A combination of novel techniques, adapted versions of existing techniques, and well-proven standard techniques were used to detect, characterise and quantify gaseous and dissolved CO2 in the sediments and the overlying seawater. This paper provides an overview of this ambitious field experiment. We describe the preparatory work prior to the release experiment, the experimental layout and procedures, the methods tested, and summarise the main results and the lessons learnt.

Highlights

  • Human activities, including fossil fuel burning, land-use changes, and cement manufacture, have caused the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration to rise from a pre-industrial level of 277 parts per million to a current level of ~412 ppm in 2020 (e.g., Friedling­ stein et al, 2019; Dlugokencky and Tans, 2020)

  • This atmospheric accumulation of anthropogenic CO2 has been linked to the rise of the global mean temperature, presently approximately 1.0 ◦C above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2018)

  • Compared to other CO2 mitigation strategies, such as improving energy efficiency and use of renewable energy, the crucial benefit of Carbon capture and storage (CCS) lies in its potential to significantly and rapidly reduce CO2 emissions while making use of infrastructure that already exists for oil and gas production (IPCC, 2005)

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Summary

Introduction

Human activities, including fossil fuel burning, land-use changes, and cement manufacture, have caused the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration to rise from a pre-industrial level of 277 parts per million (ppm) to a current level of ~412 ppm in 2020 (e.g., Friedling­ stein et al, 2019; Dlugokencky and Tans, 2020). This atmospheric accumulation of anthropogenic CO2 has been linked to the rise of the global mean temperature, presently approximately 1.0 ◦C above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2018). Compared to other CO2 mitigation strategies, such as improving energy efficiency and use of renewable energy, the crucial benefit of CCS lies in its potential to significantly (at giga-tonne scale) and rapidly reduce CO2 emissions while making use of infrastructure that already exists for oil and gas production (IPCC, 2005)

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