ENOS strives to enhance the development of CO2 storage onshore, close to CO2 emission points. Several field pilots in various geological settings will be studied in detail and best practices that stakeholders can rely on will be produced. In this way, ENOS will help demonstrate that CO2 storage is safe and environmentally sound and increase the confidence of stakeholders and the public in CCS as a viable mitigation option.
CO2 injection testing: Several onshore research sites will serve to test CO2 injection. At the storage pilot of Hontomin in Spain, 10,000 tonnes of CO2 will be injected into a limestone rock layer at a depth of 1,500 m. Key parameters will be studied in order to monitor the evolution of the geological reservoir and to demonstrate that the storage operations have no negative impact on the environment. Innovative injection strategies, designed to optimise storage whilst guaranteeing site safety in the short and long term, will also be tested. Tests at two other sites will allow project partners to improve techniques to detect CO2 in the subsurface so that, in the unlikely case that CO2 leakage were to occur, smaller amounts of CO2 could be identified more quickly. Such in-situ experiments will also help provide ground truthing for leakage simulations in two different geological settings, one in a shallow aquifer and the other along a fault plane. The first site, an initiative of the University of Nottingham and the British Geological Survey, is a field laboratory near Nottingham, UK, called the ‘GeoEnergy Testbed’, and the second is the ‘Sulcis Fault Lab’, located in Sardinia, Italy. An additional two proposed pilot storage sites, LBr-1 in the Czech Republic and Q16 Maas in the Netherlands, complete the ENOS test site portfolio.