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This project, ACTOM, is funded through the ACT programme (Accelerating CCS Technologies, Horizon2020 Project No 294766). Financial contributions made from; The Research Council of Norway, (RCN), Norway, Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy, the Netherlands, Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) together with extra funding from NERC and EPSRC research councils, United Kingdom, US-Department of Energy (US-DOE), USA. In-kind contributions from the University of Bergen are gratefully acknowledged. 

About the project

The research proposed in ACTOM will work for the advancement of offshore monitoring to ensure alignment of CO₂ storage projects with national and international regulations and societal concerns. An interdisciplinary consortium will apply methods to critically assess secure storage as this technology becomes implemented internationally as a key greenhouse gas emissions reductions strategy. The project team will build a web-based toolkit that will, for the first time, collect algorithms for designing optimal monitoring programs for offshore geological storage sites. Routines related to detecting subtle signals of a leak in a highly varying environment will be implemented in the toolkit. Through the interdisciplinary approach, the tool will assist operators in their pre-operational phase in defining assurance monitoring programs that are aligned with regulations. The inevitable uncertainties in all measurements will be assessed, and methods on how to quantify and represent them will be recommended. Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is an approach to anticipate and assess implications and expectations of new technologies grounded in the humanities and social sciences, a framework increasingly being used in marine environmental studies and in biotechnology and innovation. For the first time this framework will be used on CCUS, considering the technology in view of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. In an extension of this, potential legal conflicts between storage projects, and between storage projects and other uses of the seas, will be addressed in view of Marine Spatial Planning. We will explore the utility of the web-based toolkit to provide evaluated assessments of assurance monitoring as an aid to demonstrate RRI.