Abstract
This paper presents the technical and regulatory considerations essential for the environmental integrity of geological carbon sequestration. In this context, environmental integrity is defined as a site experiencing no CO2 leakage into the atmosphere, no groundwater contamination, and no significant earthquakes. At a time when geological sequestration is increasingly recognized as a necessary building block to the carbon-neutral economy, this paper presents a path towards its achievement with environmental integrity.
The central pillar of the paper delineates sixteen technical recommendations for ensuring environmental integrity, tracking the lifecycle of a CO2 geologic sequestration project. Within the technical realm, special attention is given to topics beyond a site's lifecycle, such as geology types, and CO2 sequestration via enhanced oil recovery. Lastly the paper discusses the governance factors essential to ensuring a legal and regulatory regime that can support these technical considerations. Though the paper draws extensively from US examples, it is designed for global applicability.
These recommendations are rooted in the authors’ combined decades of experience as non-governmental actors in the CO2 sequestration space. Together with a consortium of leading subject matter experts across the United States and Europe, the authors developed the sixteen core recommendations, and used study of regulatory frameworks for geologic sequestration to inform the principles provided.
As the funding, scale, and need for carbon capture projects accelerates dramatically, it is essential that industry and regulators are aligned toward ensuring environmental integrity – the industry's social license to operate, and the climate, will depend on it.
