One of the main unsolved issues of under-ground storages for, e.g., CO2, H2, and natural gas is the comprehensive surveillance of these areas with reasonable effort and costs. Conventional sensors (e.g., soil air probes or borehole probes), however, can only be used for punctual or locally limited measurements; further their application can cause structural influences (invasive application).
In this paper, we describe in detail the setup of a CO2 injection soil test field. This test field will be used to enhance and validate an innovative ap-proach for distributed subsurface monitoring of gas storage areas. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first time that, for this purpose, a test field is built in an application relevant scale.
BAM Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing, in cooperation with the company MeGaSen UG carries out a research project to enhance and validate an innovative approach for distributed subsurface monitoring of gas storage areas. The concept combines different measurement technologies to one multifunctional sensor: membrane-based gas measurement technology for in-situ monitoring of gases in soil and fiber optical sensing of temperature and strain (as a measure for structural change). Key aspect of the research project is the first-time validation of the system in an application relevant dimension. For this purpose a 20 x 20 m2 test field is build. A comprehensive validation of the system is carried out by systematic variation of different parameters like position-dependent gasinjection, temperature and mechanical impact.