CO2CRC hosted Ziqiu Xue and Nobuo Takasu from the Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth (RITE), Japan at the Otway International Test Centre this week, to progress discuss an important international collaboration between Australia and Japan to trial cutting edge technologies to appraise the safe storage of CO2 in the subsurface.

CO2CRC is collaborating with RITE to advance research cooperation with a specific focused on field trails at the Otway International Test Centre (OITC) to research, development and application of fiber optic sensing for CO2 migration and for optimised CO2 injection.

RITE’s technology, Distributed Strain Sensing (DSS), will form part of CO2CRC’s planned Otway Stage 4, a new field research program that will demonstrate commercially-focused reservoir management technologies to improve injection, storage, and monitoring efficiencies.

One key project within the Otway Stage 4 program is an appraisal of CO2 storage around faults, to demonstrate how these geological structures influence the migration of CO2, and the performance of emerging monitoring technologies to assess storage.

“This project has the potential to significantly reduce the costs associated with sub-surface CO2 injection and to make “injection-ready” a much wider range of reservoir types than can currently be considered. This project could, literally, bring viable COcarbon capture and underground storage to a wide range of existing onshore industrial projects and emission sources that presently cannot undertake CCUS cost-effectively. It also has the potential to increase storage efficiency offshore, even in geological areas with existing quality reservoirs.” said Matthias Raab, Chief Executive CO2CRC.

Since 2016, CO2CRC and Geoscience Australia have jointly developed this Otway fault demonstration project, and will continue to work together with RITE and other research partners as we commence the demonstration over the next couple of years.

RITE’s DSS technology represents cutting edge innovation in the use of fibre-optics in the subsurface to measure the changes in pressure and use this information to ensure that the injected CO2’s behavior is continuing as expected.

RITE spent their time at the OITC with CO2CRC and Dr Andrew Feitz from Geoscience Australia, planning the future research program.  They were also joined by NERA Program Portfolio Manager, Tim Duff, who was gaining a deeper understanding of the upcoming CO2 storage technology trials.

International collaboration and research trials at the Otway International Test Centre are essential for unlocking additional decarbonisation opportunities for Australia.