CO2Net: A marine monitoring system for CO2 leakage detection

Underwater oil and gas extraction and distribution, as well as the investigation of solutions for CO2 storage underwater, demand for new technologies to perform pervasive real life monitoring and control of underwater critical infrastructures. In this paper we present a system, named CO2Net, we have developed to perform accurate real-life monitoring of underwater CO2 storage infrastructures. The basic component of our system is the CO2Probe, a new underwater monitoring node which combines sensing, acoustic communications and networking capabilities. CO2Probes are connected via acoustic links in an underwater sensor network which provides robust, real-life communications of the monitored data both in single-hop and multi-hop deployments. The user has a real-time control on the monitoring system, being able to change alarm threshold values and sampling rates. The proposed CO2Net approach overcomes the major limitations of system currently available on the market, and provides a first easy to use, flexible and easy to extend, complete monitoring system for underwater infrastructures, based on the emerging underwater sensor networking paradigm. A first prototype of CO2Net has been tested during summer-fall 2011 at the NATO Undersea Research Centre (NURC) in La Spezia. Results of these experiments confirm system reliability, and its adaptability: all requested data where provided in real-time, the system was remotely accessible and end user could change monitoring parameters.