Environmental and seismic monitoring has begun at the UK’s first commercial-scale offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, marking an important milestone in the development of infrastructure designed to support industrial decarbonisation.
Sonardyne, a Kraken Robotics company, has successfully deployed six seabed monitoring systems at the Endurance CO₂ storage site in the Southern North Sea, approximately 150km off the coast of Teesside.
The installation, undertaken on behalf of the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP), will establish baseline environmental and seismic data ahead of future carbon dioxide injection operations.
NEP is developing CO₂ transportation and storage infrastructure centred on the Endurance reservoir, located approximately 1,000 metres beneath the seabed.
The project forms part of the East Coast Cluster decarbonisation programme, which aims to support emissions reductions across major industrial centres in Teesside and the Humber.
The monitoring installation comprises three autonomous environmental monitoring landers developed by Sonardyne, alongside three co-located TIAMAT passive seismic monitoring systems supplied by K.U.M.
Together, the systems will collect information on seawater chemistry, ocean currents, seabed conditions and seismic activity, providing reference data against which future changes can be assessed.
This information will support NEP’s long-term measurement, monitoring and verification (MMV) programme, helping operators assess reservoir integrity and maintain confidence in the security of stored CO₂.
Stephen Auld, Business Development Manager for Custom Projects at Sonardyne, said: “Confidence in offshore CO₂ storage starts with good data.”
He added that long-term assurance depends on reliable information collected throughout the storage lifecycle, rather than relying on individual measurements.
Sonardyne’s environmental monitoring systems are designed for extended deployment on the seabed, using onboard power management, edge data processing and wireless underwater communications to transmit information to the surface.
This enables ongoing monitoring and data retrieval without regularly recovering the equipment, supporting more consistent environmental oversight.
For the energy management sector, the development highlights the growing importance of monitoring and verification technologies as carbon capture and storage infrastructure moves towards commercial operation.
Reliable environmental data and long-term storage assurance will be critical to demonstrating the effectiveness of CCS as an emissions reduction option for energy-intensive industries.
The Endurance deployment represents a further step towards establishing the monitoring infrastructure needed to support large-scale offshore CO₂ storage in the UK.
Image credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/calm-blue-sea-under-a-clear-expansive-sky-Ajjy3_Vj2Fg
