Quantification of dissolved CO2 plumes at the Goldeneye CO2-release experiment

Abstract

According to many prognostic scenarios by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scaling-up of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) capture and storage (CCS) by several orders-of-magnitude is necessary to meet the target of ≤2 °C global warming by 2100 relative to preindustrial levels. Since a large fraction of the predicted CO ₂ storage capacity lies offshore, there is a pressing need to develop field-tested methods to detect and quantify potential leaks in the marine environment. Here, we combine field measurements with numerical models to determine the flow rate of a controlled release of CO ₂ in a shallow marine setting at about 119 m water depth in the North Sea. In this experiment, CO ₂ was injected into the sediment at 3 m depth at 143 kg d ^-1. The new leakage monitoring tool predicts that 91 kg d ^-1 of CO ₂ escaped across the seafloor, and that 51 kg d ^-1 of CO ₂ were retained in the sediment, in agreement with independent field estimates. The new approach relies mostly on field data collected from ship-deployed technology (towed sensors, Acoustic Doppler current profiler—ADCP), which makes it a promising tool to monitor existing and upcoming offshore CO ₂ storage sites and to detect and quantify potential CO ₂ leakage.

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