Review of the Monitoring Applications Involved in the Underground Storage of Natural Gas and CO2

Abstract

Natural gas is an indispensable resource not evenly distributed in the world. The gas supply chain is characterized by large imbalances between supply and demand, where the underground gas storage (UGS) application plays a key role for creating strategic reserves, taking advantage of geological structures. On the contrary, human activities will require clean energy with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions to be environmentally viable. A key element of this strategy is the carbon capture and storage (CCS) application useful for confining CO2 into the geosphere to reduce anthropogenic emissions. The development of appropriate injection methods and long-term monitoring systems for leak detection of the underground storage of natural gas and CO2 is important to prevent negative effects, such as ground deformations and micro seismic events. In this work, a variety of monitoring applications were gathered and critically analyzed for a total of 60 scientific contributions spanning the world. This bibliographic work shows an analytical and statistical overview of the most common use of UGS and CCS, representing the different goals of these two applications and analyzing the main monitoring techniques used in the gathered contributions. Currently, UGS monitoring requires further development, especially through multidisciplinary approaches useful for identifying possible effects on the surface and gas leaks at depth; meanwhile, CCS solutions are still at the experimental stage, also because of the high costs for large-scale applications that still need specific research. The state of the art of these two very different practices can improve the further development of new monitoring approaches or additional methods.