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CLIMIT-Forskning, utvikling og demo av CO2-håndtering

ACT on Offshore Monitoring

Awarded: NOK 6.7 mill.

The ACTOM project has been executed by a highly cross-disciplinary group of scientists from Europe and the USA. The core of the project has been to develop a Decision Support Tool for offshore monitoring and environmental impact assessments for offshore geological CO2 storage sites. To assure that the toolbox adequately addresses the right societal issues and research questions, the ACTOM project included a substantial work package on societal embedding of the CO2 storage techniques developed. The ACTOM Decision Support Tool (DST) is a fully autonomous code base that works on Linux, MS, and Mac platforms. It requires site specific data, in a documented format and a small number of user criteria (thresholds, leak rates). From that it will calculate in a matter of minutes optimal monitoring strategies and indicative impact fields. The DST can be run independently, although with no liability accepted. Potential users are encouraged to contact one of the project partners to discuss use. The DST is documented at designated web page and, among others, this page contains: - a summary overview of the DST, - a detailed description of the DST methodology - a video demonstrating our case studies for three sites in the Gulf of Mexico and in the North Sea - instructions to access and download the DST, - contacts enabling stakeholders to discuss applications with the project partners. We estimate that in bringing the disparate compute codes together, developing fast emulators for scenarios and automating the DST outputs we have achieved a 3+ point Technology Readiness Level increase from TRL 3/4 to TRL 7.

The outcome of ACTOM is expected to be a pre-operational web-based toolkit that enables: • the derivation of optimal monitoring strategies tailored to individual offshore storage sites or regions. • an operator to determine how to combine different monitoring technologies and design and update efficient monitoring programs based on assessed risks • the evaluatation of metrics and automatic decision and recommendation tools for detecting anomalies in data streams. The impact of ACTOM will be: • An ability for operators and regulators to consistently communicate capabilities, limitations, knowledge and uncertainties of monitoring to governments, stakeholders and the public at large. • A Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and a marine spatial planning (MSP) and licensing framework to evaluate CCUS in a social, regulatory and political context • Offshore monitoring strategies placed in a practicable framework in line with current regulations, standards and expectations.

The research proposed in ACTOM will work for the advancement of offshore monitoring to ensure alignment of CO2 storage projects with national and international regulations and societal concerns. An interdisciplinary consortium will apply methods to critically assess secure storage as this technology becomes implemented internationally as a key greenhouse gas emissions reductions strategy. The project team will build a web-based toolkit that will, for the first time, collect algorithms for designing optimal monitoring programs for offshore geological storage sites. Routines related to detecting subtle signals of a leak in a highly varying environment will be implemented in the toolkit. Through the interdisciplinary approach, the tool will assist operators in their pre-operational phase in defining assurance monitoring programs that are aligned with regulations. The inevitable uncertainties in all measurements will be assessed, and methods on how to quantify and represent them will be recommended. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is an approach to anticipate and assess implications and expectations of new technologies grounded in the humanities and social sciences, a framework increasingly being used in marine environmental studies and in biotechnology and innovation. For the first time this framework will be used on CCUS, considering the technology in view of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In an extension of this, potential legal conflicts between storage projects, and between storage projects and other uses of the seas, will be addressed in view of Marine Spatial Planning. We will explore the utility of the web-based toolkit to provide evaluated assessments of assurance monitoring as an aid to demonstrate RRI.

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CLIMIT-Forskning, utvikling og demo av CO2-håndtering