Greenhouse gas Laser Imaging Tomography Experiment (GreenLITE)
This report describes the development and testing of a novel system, the Greenhouse gas Laser Imaging Tomography Experiment (GreenLITE), for Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) of CO 2 at Geological Carbon Storage (GCS) sites. The system consists of a pair of laser based transceivers, a number of retroreflectors, and a set of cloud based data processing, storage and dissemination tools, which enable 2-D mapping of the CO 2 in near real time. A system was built, tested locally in New Haven, Indiana, and then deployed to the Zero Emissions Research and Technology (ZERT) facility in Bozeman, MT. Testing at ZERT demonstrated the ability of the GreenLITE system to identify and map small underground leaks, in the presence of other biological sources and with widely varying background concentrations. The system was then ruggedized and tested at the Harris test site in New Haven, IN, during winter time while exposed to temperatures as low as -15 °CºC. Additional testing was conducted using simulated concentration enhancements to validate the 2-D retrieval accuracy. This test resulted in a high confidence in the reconstruction ability to identify sources to tens of meters resolution in this configuration. Finally, the system was deployed for a period of approximately 6 months to an active industrial site, Illinois Basin – Decatur Project (IBDP), where >1M metric tons of CO 2 had been injected into an underground sandstone basin. The main objective of this final deployment was to demonstrate autonomous operation over a wide range of environmental conditions with very little human interaction, and to demonstrate the feasibility of the system for long term deployment in a GCS environment.