3rd Monitoring Network Meeting Report

Publication Overview

The third meeting of the monitoring and verification network met in Melbourne, Australia over 3 days in October and November 2006. The meeting’s objective was to provide an integrated set of monitoring and verification (M&V) guidelines to encourage further public, regulatory and technical community discussion for wide scale deployment of CCS technology. The objectives were realised by addressing the questions:

• What is the framework of a Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting and Verification (MERV) protocol for wide scale CCS deployment?
• How do we provide assurance of storage integrity through well, seal and containment monitoring technology?

The meeting brought together national and international government regulatory agencies, non-government organisations and Monitoring and Verification (M&V) technical communities in an intensive series of workshops. It was followed by a field visit by train to the site of the CO₂CRC Otway Basin Pilot Project (OBPP) in South West Victoria.

Publication Summary

The third Monitoring Network Workshop built on the material presented and discussed at the
first two meetings held in Santa Cruz, California 2004 and Rome 2005. These meetings had a
principle focus of bringing together, through presentation and discussion, both the regulatory
groups involved in setting monitoring programmes associated with CO₂ storage and those
projects that are implementing such programmes in different environments.

• The inaugural meeting of the Monitoring Network demonstrated that there is a large
  tool box of monitoring techniques that can be applied to both surface and sub-surface
  monitoring of CO₂.
• The second meeting focused on what were the monitoring requirements and how
  would they be defined with respect to risk and regulatory requirements.
• The third Monitoring meeting further enhanced the dialogue of regulatory and
  technical integration, with joint development of Monitoring, Evaluation, Reporting
  and Verification (MERV) guidelines.