Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a mature technology. Global deployment is currently accelerating, and it has a large potential to support global decarbonization as outlined in recent IPCC reports. There has been a vast amount of research, technology development, small-scale demonstration, and knowledge generation and sharing taken place over the past two or three decades. CCS is generally considered to be safe, with no or limited indication of leakage towards the hydrosphere, biosphere or even atmosphere. This assurance is supported by a profound understanding of the leakage mechanisms from laboratory and natural analogue studies as well as related modelling studies. In addition, thorough geophysical and geochemical monitoring plans have been developed to conform reservoir conformance and seal integrity.
So why bother and still care about leakage? Future storage scenarios will need to focus on larger scales and storage capacity optimization to meet the demand for this technology and for making it cost effective and targeted to large industrial areas. Along with remaining uncertainties, this requires an in-depth understanding of the coupled thermo-hydro-chemical-mechanical processes occurring in reservoir seals to estimate the likelihood of leakage and related rates.
This lecture will highlight these topics and will discuss the current state of knowledge. This includes leakage monitoring as well as possible limitations and aims at providing some thoughts on public and regulator concerns.
In this lecture, I’ll showcase several non-seismic applications of DFOS, with a focus on distributed strain sensing based hydraulic fracture monitoring and distributed temperature sensing based well integrity monitoring. Through a series of field case studies, I will demonstrate the value of DFOS measurements in the hydrocarbon exploitation and carbon dioxide sequestration sectors, emphasizing the significant business impact of cross-disciplinary research in this domain.