On-going development of five geochemical monitoring technologies for onshore CCS

A critical aspect of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) will be the ability to adequately monitor the injection site, both to ensure public and environmental safety and for “carbon credit auditing”. In the unlikely event of a leakage in the near-surface environment, the study of natural CO2 emanations in volcanic and geothermal environments have shown that the gas will tend to migrate along the path of least resistance and create spatially restricted “hotspot” leaks at the ground surface that can be challenging to find and quantify. For this reason, innovative technologies are required to improve our ability to detect, locate and characterize such features. To address this need our group is developing geochemical monitoring tools that confront the significant challenges associated with spatial, analytical and temporal resolution and sensitivity. Here we describe on-going work focused on increasing the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of five prototypes and concepts developed by the Tectonics and Fluid Chemistry Lab (TFCL) at Sapienza University of Rome: the GasPro, Mapper, Multipla, Well-Star, and SWiM systems.