Regulatory issues associated with deep (geological) CO2 storage

Publisher Summary This chapter highlights that in response to the potential developing industry associated with deep CO 2 storage and recognizing the need for some form of regulatory guidance or control, the IEA greenhouse gas R&D program recently commissioned a study to identify and discuss potential regulatory issues associated with deep CO 2 storage. The chapter presents a summary of the findings from this study. Regulatory issues are discussed in the context of relevant timeframes. Most industry standards and codes relate principally to an operational period for engineering projects of up to several decades, perhaps as much as one hundred years. In contrast, CO 2 stored in geological reservoirs should remain there for at least several hundred, and possibly thousands of years. Thus, the focus of this chapter has been on the long-term framework for CO 2 storage. Two independent timeframes are identifiable, according to the specific responsibilities of a regulatory system. The first relates to reservoir storage performance, or permanence and the second timeframe relates to local environmental impacts. Issues were discussed in terms of these two timeframes under six main topic areas: liability, economics, record keeping, wellbore integrity, reservoir leakage, and monitoring. Such issues are interrelated and there is considerable overlap among/between the individual topics.