The United Kingdom’s National Oceanographic Center (NOC) on Tuesday announced what it called a first-ever “deep-water experiment” that will simulate emissions from a carbon dioxide storage reservoir.
The project, scheduled for 2018, is intended to provide additional demonstration of the safety of offshore carbon capture and storage projects, according to a NOC press release. It will involve injecting minimal amounts of carbon dioxide into North Sea sea-floor mud 62 miles northeast of Aberdeen, Scotland. The location, close to a depleted gas field, corresponds to the type of site that could be employed in CO2 storage, NOC said.
“Currently, it is challenging to detect and quantify CO2 emissions in the marine environment because of dispersion and attenuation effects, the small volumes involved and considering large existing natural variability,” project leader Doug Connelly said in the release. “This project is a really exciting opportunity to develop innovative, safe and cost effective technology to address these problems.”
The project is a component of a broader 16-million-euro program to establish a method for identifying and gauging CO2 release amounts. “This work will help provide greater reassurance around the safety of CCS operations in the future,” said NOC, an ocean research and technology provider that is wholly owned by the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council.
The project will include development of acoustic and chemical sensors that can be carried by remote-controlled submersibles to “listen” for CO2 releases, the press release says. Separate technologies will check for shifts in temperature, chemistry, salinity, and currents in the sea near the test site. “All this technology will be launched at the site in Scotland a year before the controlled release in order to acquire an in-depth picture of the natural variability of the environment on a daily, weekly and seasonal timescale,” NOC said. “This information will enable scientists to better differentiate natural changes from those resulting from the controlled release.”
