Offshore staff

BERGEN, Norway – Octio will conduct a pilot project offshore Norway next year to assess the permanent monitoring of carbon dioxide (CO₂) storage under the seabed.

The work forms part of the CLIMIT program, jointly administered by Gassnova and the Norwegian Research Council, and designed to encourage commercial development of technology for capturing and storing CO₂.

When CO₂ is stored under the seabed, a secure procedure must be in place to identify potential leaks before incidents occur.

Traditionally, Octio says, monitoring of CO₂ injection into the seabed has been performed via seismic acquisition tools deployed from ships. However, permanent seismic monitoring is becoming more common for subsea surveillance tasks, such as monitoring of oil and gas injector wells.

The assumption is that permanent monitoring of CO₂ storage under the seabed can be more effective and less expensive. With traditional seismic shoots, there are long intervals between repeat surveys, while with permanent monitoring, changes are identified immediately.

Octio’s project is intended to verify a cost-effective system for subsea CO₂ storage combining permanent monitoring of the seabed with other forms of environmental monitoring of the sea in a comprehensive warning system.

The company has a proprietary permanent monitoring technology that involves placing seismic nodes on the seabed in the area under surveillance. These send data continuously on changes in the seabed conditions to a surface vessel, platform or a central onshore facility.

Further, these signals are combined with other input from oceanographic and environmental monitoring to give supervisors a better picture of suspicious changes in the seabed or the environment.

“An important research area connected to storage is to be able to monitor CO₂ storage in a deep sand sediment, both with regards to following distribution of the gas in the reservoir and detecting leakage at an early stage,” said senior adviser Svein Staal Eggen on behalf of CLIMIT.

10/31/2011