Optimal sensors placement for detecting CO2 discharges from unknown locations on the seafloor

Assurance monitoring of the marine environment is a required and intrinsic part of CO2 storage project. To reduce the costs related to the monitoring effort, the monitoring program must be designed with optimal use of instrumentation. Here we use solution of a classical set cover problem to design placement of an array of fixed chemical sensors with the purpose of detecting a seep of CO2 through the seafloor from an unknown location. The solution of the problem is not unique and different aspects, such as cost or existing infrastructure, can be added to define an optimal solution. We formulate an optimization problem and propose a method to generate footprints of potential seeps using an advection–diffusion model and a stoichiometric method for detection of small seepage CO2 signals. We provide some numerical experiments to illustrate the concepts.