CO2CRC’s Otway Stage 3 M&V Project will develop and commercialise next generation subsurface M&V technologies.
Otway Stage 3 Project: Next generation CCUS monitoring
The challenge
CO2 storage projects require monitoring and verification (M&V) to understand behaviour of the CO₂ plume and provide assurance of storage complex integrity.
The solution
CO2CRC’s Otway Stage 3 M&V Project will develop and commercialise next generation subsurface M&V technologies.
These technologies, explained in the video below provide on-demand, permanent monitoring solutions, enabling continuous plume data acquisition, transmission and analysis. They are expected to drive down costs by up to 75% while also decreasing environmental footprint of traditional monitoring techniques.
The proposed M&V techniques will provide regulators and communities with ongoing confidence that CO2 injected deep underground is permanently stored within the bounds of the storage formation in large scale CCUS projects.
Learn more about Stage 3 in Stage 3 technical details
Benefits to industry
Implementation
Drilling of new monitoring wells commenced in July 2019. All base line surveys and pre-injection tests are on track to be completed by Q1 2020.
CO2 injection will commence in October 2020 at a rate of 150 tonnes per day. Injection will be paused after 5,000 tonnes to perform intermediate subsurface seismic, surface seismic and pressure tomography testing. Surface seismic data will provide a benchmark for comparison with the acquired pressure tomography and subsurface seismic data.
The injection will resume thereafter, and an assessment will be made to determine if the injection needs to be paused after 10,000 tonnes to perform another round of intermediate surveys. The final round of pressure and seismic surveys (subsurface and surface) will be performed once the full 15,000 tonnes of CO2 are injected
The volume of 5,000 tonnes was selected because it proved detectable in past benchmark surveys at the site. Modelling of the new Stage 3 techniques suggests that 5,000 tonnes will also be detectable via these methods. Further injections will be sized to give information about how sensitivity scales with mass.
Acknowledgements
The Otway Stage 3 Project is funded by the Australian Government’s Education Investment Fund, COAL21 through ANLEC R&D, BHP and the Victorian State Government. CO2RC would like to acknowledge the significant contributions from CSIRO and Curtin University.
Learn more about Stage 3 in Stage 3 technical details
The various facilities at the OITC, including deep wells, ground water bores, the buried seismic monitoring array,
the CO2 production plant, gas pipelines and other infrastructure.
