Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University has secured £1.4 million funding to identify the UK’s best sites for ‘carbon storage’ to help it reach its net zero targets (www.hw.ac.uk).

The gas fields of the southern North Sea are the focus of this project, which has received funding from the Oil and Gas Technology Centre (OGTC) plus support from the UK regulator, the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA), offshore operators and data owners.

John Underhill, chief scientist at the university, said: “The Southern North Sea is near three of the UK’s largest carbon emission areas: the industrial hubs of Teesside, Humberside and the Thames estuary.

“It also has a number of depleted gas fields that could be repurposed to store carbon.

“We are going to systematically examine the geology of these sites and determine which critical factors allow carbon to be safely stored over geological time-scales.”

The team will also create a ‘road-map’ for other sites, showing their geological features, carbon storage suitability and any potential leakage points.

Accurate mapping will also be used to develop mitigation strategies and early warning systems for any carbon escape or seepage.

The Heriot-Watt team will use data from the OGA’s National Data Repository, which was made ‘open access’ for the first time in 2019.

The project will receive funding from the OGTC’s Subsurface Solution Centre, which is supporting accelerating decarbonisation technologies in the UK.