Risk-based framework for assessing CO2 storage monitoring

There is an urgent need for scale-up beyond the banked capacity of important CCS flagship projects. Accelerating CCS to provide significant CO2 emissions reductions by 2030 requires close integration of technical, economic, societal and environmental disciplines to support the decision process related to permitting and securing containment and conformance during the execution phase of CCS projects. We see several key challenges that new research projects need to address in preparation for industrialization and upscaling of CO2 storage. 1) There is a need to accelerate maturing and permitting of new bankable storage capacity. Scaling up to gigatonnes of new storage capacity requires accelerated characterisation of storage sites and development of safe injection and pressure management strategies that can support accelerating injection rates, addressing specifically containment and conformance to secure acceptable risk levels for new projects. 2) Society needs to be prepared for large-scale CCS deployment. Engaging stakeholder groups is essential for assessing top societal concerns in the planning of regional storage development and designing scale-up plans to minimise the impact on other industries or public interests. 3) Securing conformance in CO2 storage operations is critical for licence to operate and for building long-term trust between industry and society. Industrialization of CCS rests upon our ability to develop transparent methodologies for monitoring conformance. RamonCO will support CO2 storage project development by providing clear workflows for multi-physics inversion and probabilistic conformance monitoring that meets regulatory requirements. This will provide the basis for the design of an effective and fit-for-purpose, site-specific monitoring approach. Combining these monitoring approaches with societal aspects, will support risk governance strategies for industry and regulators and incorporate them in decision support tools.

The CETPartnership proposal RamonCO submitted to the Joint Call TRI3 - Call module 3.1: "CCU/CCS technologies" has been selected for funding. The CETPartnership project RamonCO will develop and demonstrate methodologies and tools for conformance assessment and risk-based monitoring of CO2 storage projects. An operational multi-physics inversion framework capable of assimilating different types of geophysical and operational time lapse data will be developed. Based on the Societal Embeddedness Level (SEL) and bow-tie methodologies RamonCO will develop societal risk governance strategies and tools for risks identified as critical. By integrating the new methodologies developed, RamonCO will design a probabilistic methodology to enable regulators and operators to assess the expected performance of monitoring strategies in the context of specific identified risks. The RamonCO consortium includes renowed partners from USA, the Netherlands, Germany, Romania and Greece. esearch questions will be addressed by a multidisciplinary approach combining geophysics, applied mathematics, numerical simulation, social and techno-economic sciences