According to many prognostic scenarios by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a scaling-up of carbon dioxide (CO₂) capture and storage (CCS) by several orders-of-magnitude is necessary to meet the target of ≤2 °C global warming by 2100 relative to preindustrial levels. Since a large fraction of the predicted CO₂ storage capacity lies offshore, there is a pressing need to develop field-tested methods to detect and quantify potential leaks in the marine environment. Here, we combine field measurements with numerical models to determine the flow rate of a controlled release of CO₂ in a shallow marine setting at about 119 m water depth in the North Sea. In this experiment, CO₂ was injected into the sediment at 3 m depth at 143 kg d^-1. The new leakage monitoring tool predicts that 91 kg d^-1 of CO₂ escaped across the seafloor, and that 51 kg d^-1 of CO₂ were retained in the sediment, in agreement with independent field estimates. The new approach relies mostly on field data collected from ship-deployed technology (towed sensors, Acoustic Doppler current profiler—ADCP), which makes it a promising tool to monitor existing and upcoming offshore CO₂ storage sites and to detect and quantify potential CO₂ leakage.

根据政府间气候变化专门委员会 (IPCC) 的许多预测情景，需要将二氧化碳 (CO ₂ ) 捕获和封存 (CCS)扩大几个数量级才能实现≤2°的目标C 到 2100 年全球变暖相对于工业化前水平。由于预测的 CO ₂存储容量的很大一部分位于海上，因此迫切需要开发经过现场测试的方法来检测和量化海洋环境中的潜在泄漏。在这里，我们将现场测量与数值模型相结合，以确定在北海约 119 m 水深的浅海环境中受控释放 CO ₂的流速。在本实验中，CO ₂以 143 kg d ^{-1 的}压力注入 3 m 深的沉积物中。新的泄漏监测工具预测，91 kg d ^-1的 CO ₂穿过海底逸出，51 kg d ^-1的 CO ₂保留在沉积物中，与独立的现场估计值一致。新方法主要依赖于从船舶部署技术（拖曳传感器、声学多普勒电流剖面仪 - ADCP）收集的现场数据，这使其成为监测现有和即将到来的海上 CO ₂封存地点以及检测和量化潜在 CO ₂的有前途的工具泄漏。