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Monitoring Network Meeting IEAGHG held the 10th Monitoring Network meeting at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California on 10th-12th June 2015. The venue is one of several US Government national laboratories, which conducts a wide range of technical R&D including the advancement of low carbon technologies. There were 45 presentations that covered a range of topics, including sessions on cost-effective monitoring of large projects, permit requirements, induced seismicity, shallow monitoring, geophysical monitoring and CO2 relationships, pressure monitoring applications and monitoring tools for shallow, surface and deep monitoring. The meeting also covered updates on demonstration projects and post-closure monitoring. Of particular note were the international research collaborations being created around the Aquistore storage site in Saskatchewan and around the CMC controlled release in overburden under development in Alberta. The Aquistore project has just started injecting CO2 captured from the Boundary Dam coal power station into a deep saline formation, some 7,000 tonnes injected so far. The Canadian research institute PTRC has monitoring research collaborations with 26 organisations from 7 countries at this ‘field laboratory’. The first monitoring data was shared at this meeting from downhole pressure, seismic, and pulsed-neutron logging measurements. A key conclusion that have emerged from this meeting is the value of pressure based monitoring for assessing reservoir behaviour and in the overburden for leak detection. The meeting also identified the potential of fibre-optic distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) and permanent sources, the benefits of good engagement with regulators, the importance of geomechanical analysis using the monitoring data, and the feasibility of offshore monitoring for leak detection and quantification as notable advances |
