The project will be commissioned and funded by the ETI  and will seek to develop a monitoring system which could be deployed using static monitoring equipment and marine robotics such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs).

The project will be led by Fugro GEOS in collaboration with Sonardyne, the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) and the British Geological Survey (both part of NERC), Plymouth Marine Laboratory and the University of Southampton. The ETI is to invest £1m in the first phase of the project.

The ETI is to invest £1m in the first phase of the project. The first 12 months will see the economic and technological plans for the monitoring system developed.

Although there are existing technology components which can detect CO2 in a marine environment, there are no integrated, cost-effective and commercially available systems which can currently reliably record and report anomalies in the level of CO2 in the sea above a large store. The need to introduce capability for the robust monitoring of underground CO2 storage sites is in response to legislation such as the European Union’s directive on CO2 storage. This states that any storage operator must monitor for potential leaks and examine whether any leak is damaging to the environment or human health.

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Source: Carbon Capture Journal, 12 May 2014