Developing Approaches for Background Seismicity Monitoring of Potential CO2 Storage Sites in Horda Area Offshore Norway

Equinor in collaboration with Shell and Total is working on maturing the carbon storage project to store industrially produced CO2 into geological subsurface offshore Norway. However, the selected candidates for CO2 storage are part of a region with moderate natural seismicity. In order to assure a safe storage, the background seismicity should be monitored to understand both the nature of natural seismicity and to detect possible events induced by the imposed pressure changes due to CO2 injection.

Current existing seismic network onshore is rather sparse and due to the limitation of recording mostly from the Norwegian side, event location uncertainty is rather high which complicates associating individual earthquakes to specific faults. Integration of onshore network with selected offshore PRM stations improved detectability. However, a more local monitoring system is required to improve the detectability and reduce the location uncertainty. We here present a proposal for a seismic monitoring array design for the offshore setting around the Smeaheia and Aurora sites that includes an upgrade of the onshore monitoring network as well as some ocean bottom nodes. We argue that such a network will provide an adequate baseline dataset, which is crucial for understanding the site prior to injection.