This NSTA Technical Report presents a review of the role of monitoring for offshore carbon storage sites, with a particular emphasis on those sites with restricted access owing to co-location with other marine industries, and particularly offshore windfarms. It is intended to provide both a high-level review of the current state of knowledge to support industry framing of co-location considerations, and examples of the types of technology to be considered around a carbon storage site.
Key messages from the report include:
- There are no one-size-fits-all solutions. Monitoring activities must be tailored to the risk and uncertainties of specific storage sites.
- Seismic surveying for carbon storage sites in and around existing offshore wind farms can be extremely challenging when conventional long-cable towed seismic streamers are deployed. Potential mitigating solutions do exist (e.g. Ocean Bottom Nodes/OBN) although with higher costs and more limited coverage.
- There is an expectation that first-of-a-kind (FOAK) monitoring approaches may be over-engineered as the industry tests and certifies different MMV methods. This is crucial to maintaining public confidence, and each project will require a robust set of baseline data.
- Based on current technologies, large physical overlaps between carbon storage sites and wind farms are presently considered not to be feasible with respect to infrastructure and resulting requirements for routine and emergency operational access requirements.
- The co-existence of carbon storage and offshore wind farms requires early and active collaboration and should involve cross-disciplinary teams of specialists to optimise co-location/seabed access design on a project-by-project basis. Such approaches should also explore the synergies between projects for both a data-gathering and operations.
The full technical report is available to download below.