Environmental Impacts Meeting Report

Publication Overview

The meeting was held over 3 days, and covered views of both regulators and industry, and the presentations covered impacts of leaks in both terrestrial and marine environments, and also extensively covered the experience of various research bodies and projects from Europe and the USA. The closing session included an open discussion to determine the needs of the different groups likely to be involved in a storage project, from regulators, industry, researchers and the general public.

Publication Summary

• Some techniques are able to detect CO₂ to low levels, such as a few tonnes per year, but
  these techniques require further assessment in order to verify this.
• The processes involved in near surface transport require greater understanding, and this
  is a gap that research could go some way towards rectifying,
• The precise effects on ecosystems of multiple stressors is unknown, and this must be
  investigated further,
• There is a requirement for the further development of monitoring techniques for
  monitoring of environmental impacts,
• There is some confusion over the frequency of use of the term ‘significant’ and the
  definition could be subject to variation depending on the ecosystem in question.
  The conclusions that can be taken from the workshop are that the ongoing CO₂ release
  experiments around the world are providing valuable data to research groups, and natural
  occurrences of CO₂ leakage are proving to be good analogues and learning experiences.
  However this learning is subject to limitations, and some knowledge gaps cannot be breached
  with either experimental release experiments or the study of natural analogues. Such
  knowledge gaps are the effects and impacts of saline formation water displacement due to CO₂
  injection, impacts on ground water, the effects of co-injected or mobilised species, and the
  testing of system models which require real, large scale storage projects in order to validate
  modelled situations.