Pressure control and conformance management for safe and efficient CO2 storage – lessons learned in the Pre-ACT project

The three-year (2017-2020) Pre-ACT project was established as one of the three large projects in the first round of the Accelerating CCS Technologies (ACT) program (https://act-ccs.eu). Pre-ACT was a collaborative effort between partners from six research institutes and four companies with an active role in CCS. The project ambition was to deliver cutting-edge research into the safe storage and monitoring of CO2, particularly to improve strategies for monitoring and management of the pore pressure distribution within the storage reservoir. Pre-ACT has established methodologies for assessing the conformance of a storage site, relative to its expected performance. The primary outputs are quantitative conformance systems (protocols), which rely on cost-effective monitoring, and guidelines on how to act in case of non-conformance. The protocols are applicable to industrial operators and focus on the main storage-related challenges for accelerated deployment of CCS: capacity, confidence and cost. We report here on the lessons learned within the project, both in terms of European collaboration between research institutes and industry partners in the new ACT-program, but most of all in terms of the new knowledge and methods related to monitoring and control over large-scale storage projects in the North Sea. In addition, we describe a unique experimental campaign with brine and CO2 injection at the new ECCSEL Svelvik CO2 Field Lab and touch upon the important work of communicating research findings to external stakeholders such as policy makers, regulators, and potential future CCS project operators.