Monitoring for seismological and geochemical groundwater effects of high-volume pumping of natural gas at the Stenlille underground gas storage facility, Denmark

Abstract

The large natural gas storage facility at Stenlille, Denmark, has been monitored to investigate the effect of pumping large amounts of gas into the subsurface. Here, we present a new dataset of microseismicity at Stenlille since 2018. We compare these data with methane in groundwater, which has been monitored since gas storage was established in 1989. Further, we conducted a controlled 172 day microcosm experiment of methane oxidation on an isolated microbial community under both aerobic and anaerobic conditions. For this experiment, water was filtered from a well at Stenlille with elevated levels of thermogenic methane and ethane. No microseismic activity was detected in the gas storage area above an estimated detection level of ML 0.0 for the established network. The long-term monitoring for methane in groundwater has still only detected one leak, in 1995, related to a technical problem during injection. The microcosm experiment revealed that oxidation of methane occurred only under aerobic conditions during the experiment, as compared to anaerobic conditions, even though the filtered water was anoxic