BGS - British Geological Survey (NERC)

The British Geological Survey (BGS) forms part of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
and is the United Kingdom’s national geological survey. It is the custodian of much of the country’s
geoscientific information, and is responsible for advising the UK government on all aspects of geoscience.

BGS is a world leader in the field of underground CO2 storage. Over the past two years they have carried out more than 40 CO2 storage projects with a current annual CCS budget of over £1.4 m. BGS co-ordinated the ground-breaking Joule II project in the mid-1990s and since then has had a leading role in many key storage projects including co-ordinating the new FP7 project RISCS. These include: monitoring and modelling at Sleipner; developing site monitoring programmes for potential European storage sites; coordinating CO2GeoNet; mapping UK storage potential; developing the IEAGHG web-based site monitoring selection tool; reviewing monitoring technologies for CO2 storage to the DTI Cleaner Fossil Fuels Programme and studies of the geological storage potential of India and China for a number of clients.

 

BGS has also been strongly involved in developing the CO2 storage regulatory framework, and have provided high-level technical advice to a number of regulatory authorities, including the EC, the UK government and a number of overseas governments. BGS supplied a Lead Author to the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage and to the IPCC Guidelines for Compiling National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. BGS are also involved in public perception and dissemination issues, for example participating in a socio-economic study for geological storage in the UK funded by the Tyndall Centre.

Our main tasks in CO2CARE will be researching into the long-term plume stabilization processes, timelapse leakage detection, predictive history-matching of the CO2 plume at Sleipner, risk assessment at Sleipner, compilation of the Best Practice document for Site Abandonment, and steering the site dry-runs.