I herein provide an overview of the post-closure roles of the public sector in relation to long-term responsibilities and liabilities concerning carbon dioxide storage under EU directives, UK regulations, Alberta laws, Australia laws, and North Dakota codes.

Liquefied Natural Gas（LNG）projects has been JOGMEC’s major focus on financially supporting Japanese companies since the 2010s. Various non-technical risks have affected the projects in recent years, for example 1）global issues as geopolitics and climate change, 2）political/economic/environmental/social development issues in resource-producing countries, 3）portfolio strategies of operator companies, sales competition, and financing amid the rise of Sustainable Development Goals（SDGs）and Environmental, Social, and Governance（ESG）investment. Under these circumstances, the Energy Project Department in JOGMEC has been gradually adopting “risk-based approach” to better evaluate non-technical risks among numerous projects.

In the risk-based approach, non-technical risks are challenging to assess because it ranges from qualitative to quantitative measures. One way to strengthen the assessment is to evaluate the risks together with risk factors and control measures. The approach is based on a versatile method that can also be applied easily to non-LNG projects, such as carbon capture and storage（CCS）. The project’s relevance and quality of project management are expected to improve by using the approach. On the other hand, the decision making team must be fully informed of the potential to overexaggerate risks, which could lead to pessimistic thinking.

Regarding CCS deployment, JOGMEC is involved in variety of initiatives, including promoting Japanese Advanced CCS Projects, publishing “CCS guideline”, and holding workshops. In 2023, Energy Project Department held an “internal workshop on CCS business risks” which discussed substantial risks by comprehensively identifying primary risk factors from the supply chain and control measures. However, the discussion did not extend to the possibility of occurrence or impact, which highlights uncertainty in other projects. Given the uncertainty, to make CCS projects spread in the future, JOGMEC will deeply collaborate with Japanese government and companies to assess domestic and international policy trends, business implementation opportunities, business management, and business risks.

Japanese government has implemented a new green transformation（GX）policy in 2023 to expand investment in GX sector. Government is targeting to invest 150 trillion yen into GX sector for the next decade. In order to induce GX investment, finance market pressure as well as government policy is critical. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the rules and movements in the finance market.

In terms of environment surrounding financing facilities, environmental, social, and governance（ESG）investment is expanding globally, as well as target settings toward net-zero financed emission in some financing facilities are observed, partly in Japanese facilities. These environments promote entities to invest more in green sectors. Although, backlash against ESG investment is starting to happen, especially in the USA, this trend needs to be paid attention, whether this resists the macro ESG trend.

The finance policy trend in Japan is seeking to create investment chances in GX sector, especially for the transition technologies. Japanese government has created a new financing method called “Transition Finance”, to establish investment chance for appropriate technologies to reach carbon neutrality. The government will issue the new bond, GX Economy Transition Bond, utilizing this finance method to stimulate the usage. However, there are obstacles for further implementation of this new method, especially designing appropriate incentives for users of this method, bond issuer and the creditor.

Swiss Re vision is ‘we make the world more resilient’. Swiss Re insure, invest, operate, and share their knowledge in a way that tackles sustainability challenges and creates long-term value. Net-zero activity of Swiss Re have started in 2003, recently announced oil and gas policy for re/insurance underwriting. Reinsurance companies provide 6 functions with primary insurance companies, e.g., increase large-line capacity, provide underwriting guidance, via treaty reinsurance or facultative reinsurance. Insurance products require 6 fundamentals, e.g., risk taker, insurable interest, alignment of interests. Insurance can be an efficient planning and budget management mechanism. For the implementation of new practices and technologies, insurance can de-risk most of the value chain, which reduces the level of risk retained by the developer. This also reduces the risk for investors and other stakeholders. Each re/insurer has different risk appetite. Each phase of CCS projects requires different types of insurance. Some types of insurance are matured and easy to procure, while others are difficult or uninsurable.

The “Investigation of potential sites for CO₂ storage in Japan” project, initiated in 2014, is a collaborative effort between the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Ministry of the Environment. The project aims to identify multiple large-scale storage sites capable of holding over 100 million tons of CO₂. Japan CCS Co., Ltd. has been entrusted with the project, conducting activities such as seismic surveys, geological analyses, and numerical simulations for potential offshore storage sites in Japan. The evaluation of storage capacity, based on 3D seismic data until March 2023, estimates a total storage potential of around 16 billion tons across eleven sites. This assessment uses the volumetric method, focusing on the pore space capacity in the reservoir rock, without considering factors such as seal ability, injection well arrangement, injection properties, and CO₂ movement. We organized the sedimentary environment and geological age at geological analysis sites based on 3D seismic data and found that the reservoir layer offshore Japan is sandy splay/channel deposits from the Miocene to Pleistocene submarine ramp/slope apron system and delta system. The main candidates for the shielding layer are muddy sediments deposited in slopes and ocean basins during the transgressive period. In addition, we compared and discussed the injectivity（Kh）and the difference between formation pressure and formation fracture pressure from the simulation model at each site. In order to reduce uncertainty in assessing the amount of storage and to improve the accuracy of risk assessment, it is necessary to drill survey wells.

Carbon capture and storage（CCS）is an essential technology to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. In 2023, Ministry of Eeconomy, Ttrade and Iindustry（METI）announced CCS long term roadmap toward 2050 with six specific actions to commence CCS projects by 2030. As one of those actions,

JOGMEC selected seven CCS projects as “Japanese advanced CCS projects” to provide support to the entire CCS value chain from CO₂ separation, capture to transportation and storage. In this paper the circumstances of the projects and the way forward are introduced.

We discuss some technical issues to consider for coming industrial-scale CO₂ storage in Japan, which includes geological risks associated with reservoir injectivity and fault. Injectivity directly affects the economic feasibility of projects. The current proposed sites may be insufficient in terms of injectivity, comparing with the world standard. Induced seismicity, typically associated with fault reactivation, is one of the main issues in Japan, a land of earthquakes. We may avoid large seismicity, as long as we use soft-rock reservoirs. We however need a little more effort for public perception.

Currently, companies and institutions that have traditionally focused on oil and gas development are trying to innovate their business through digital transformation. Among them, machine learning/deep learning （ML/DL）is one of the main factors of them and can be used in various ways. Here, we have introduced more recent analysis methods for attribute analysis of seismic data, to which ML/DL has been applied for a long time and improved the extraction to create more appropriate reservoir distribution images. In the case of applying the method to a certain oil field data in Vietnam, we tried to analyze the seismic data with some targeted thin and heterogeneous sandstone reservoirs using the frequency response by spectral decomposition as the input feature. In addition to principal component analysis as a conventional approach, we applied kernel principal component analysis and autoencoder that expresses and extracts non-linear features and used such unsupervised learning analyses to image seismic facies distribution that are more suitable for interpretation. Various hyperparameters, such as the number of output principal components in kernel principal component analysis and the parameters of multi-layer perceptrons that composed the autoencoder process, were set appropriately. As a result, the dimensionality reduction of the responses from the target reservoirs is effectively achieved, and the image of its sedimentary environment is improved by clustering. In addition to this, another case of analysis for injectite sandstone in an undisclosed oil field data is also reported here to show an example of using a convolutional neural network approach in the autoencoder, providing complex distribution images of the sandstones successfully. The ML/DL analysis environment and methods used here can be applied not only to seismic data but also to general technical data, and then it is expected that efforts will be made to utilize them for improvement of technical operations.

Digital technologies have changed the world significantly and will further disrupt the way we work and live. Internet of Things（IOT）, big data analytics, Artificial Intelligence（AI）and Machine Learning（ML）, robotics, advance computing and other technologies are blurring the boundary between the physical and digital world and the energy industry is very much impacted by digital technologies. With scalable cloud environments and resources that can deliver a high-performance compute to everyone, with access to all available data across the subsurface and surface, and advances in AI and ML, acceleration and automation enabled through digital technologies is now critical to improve efficiency, drive down cost, and to reduce the carbon footprint of our industry and beyond.

This paper articulates the key advancements, benefits, and the substantial gains digital technology can ,and should, bring to Geoscience as a whole, while also addressing the challenges that impede the enterprise-wide adoption of new digital technologies.

Among the key enablers are the migration to cloud environments, which heralds a new era of digital transformation characterized by performance, scalability, and integration through Software as a Service（SaaS）models. Moreover, the paper highlights the critical role of high-performance computing, scalable data access, and embedded AI and analytics to foster new and innovative solutions to solve industry challenges.

Lastly, the paper discusses the evolution of the industry, emphasizing the necessity of adaptability and evolution in leveraging digital technologies for substantial value creation. It underscores the shifting dynamics between software and IT technology, and between suppliers and consumers, towards more collaborative and partnership-oriented models with horizontal and vertical alignment within, and between, organizations. This shift is crucial for achieving the industry’s objectives to digitalize and decarbonize, calling for a collective effort to enact the necessary changes.

CO₂ injection into deep saline aquifers may cause formation pressure buildup. People have concerns on induced seismicity due to fault reactivation resulting from the pressure buildup. Pressure buildup is a function of CO₂ injection rate and volume, as well as reservoir property such as porosity and permeability. This paper presents a brief review of induced seismic monitoring in the large-scale CO₂ storage projects, two in North America and one in Japan. We also introduce a unique traffic light system for induced seismicity risk management, securing the CO₂ injection safety and assisting risk communication and community engagement.