2023 Volume 88 Issue 1 Pages 34-45
In carbon dioxide capture and storage（CCS）projects, monitoring the plume and potential risks, for example, induced seismicity, is essential for safe and stable operation. Although the effectiveness of the monitoring technologies has been proven by existing pilot-scale projects, optimizing cost-benefit is necessary for large-scale CCS projects. However, there are many candidate methods and it is sometimes difficult to select an appropriate combination from them. Also, when grand design of the CCS project is not well recognized and the risk analysis is not implemented at the beginning, it often results in unnecessary confusion in planning the monitoring scheme. To tackle the challenges, visualizing the whole framework needed for monitoring design is proposed. We examined several published projects and extracted monitoring frameworks common to most of them. Also, the technology ranking method was reviewed for quantitative comparison of different monitoring methods. Based on these, we started our monitoring plan by teaming up with a variety of technical experts and listing up candidate monitoring technologies. We found that this approach was effective since we could build and share the concept of CCS monitoring through repeated discussions from the start. This made inter-technical cooperation possible, and the unbiased selection of monitoring technologies was achieved. We also started the process by assessing risk scenarios since we could understand from the extracted frameworks that a riskbased monitoring plan is essential for CCS projects. Understanding the whole framework enabled us to mitigate undesired confusion between each expert. We also discuss some of the newly recognized challenges in our monitoring design.
