CESEP Brine Leakage Monitoring Experiments

The Center for Experimental Study of Subsurface Environmental Processes (CESEP) conducted an intermediate-scale laboratory experiment to validate a developed framework for designing CO2-sequesteration monitoring systems based on using brine leakage as an early indictor for CO2 leakage. The developed framework incorporates the linear uncertainty analysis tool in PEST with the global optimizer of Genetic Algorithm and a FEFLOW-based transport model to find the best monitoring locations to detect the leakage and provide the designer with useful data to make remediation-related predictions. In an ~8m long soil tank, a brine leakage plume from the storage zone to the shallow aquifer was monitored using the system designed by this framework. The collected high-resolution data was then used to calibrate the model and make the predictions of interest, which were eventually compared to experimental measurements to evaluate the data informativity and thus validate the framework applicability. Acquired data from the monitoring system included transient measurements of the hydraulic heads and plume concentrations. In additions, the tracer injection rates, tank inflows and outflows were also measured. The conducted experiment and the testing system are described in detail in a research article developed by the dataset authors and entitled "Monitoring Brine Leakage from Deep Geologic Formations Storing Carbon Dioxide: Design Framework Validation Using Intermediate-Scale Experiment". For any questions, users are referred to the data owners.