by Juli Berwald
In 2006, the very first tweet was sent. It read, “just setting up my twttr.” That same year, the Gulf Coast Carbon Center (GCCC), along with many partners, was starting an effort you could argue was even more ambitious. It would provide key information about one of the most feasible technologies we currently have available to mitigate climate change. The GCCC was in the planning stages of the most densely observed field study of carbon capture and sequestration in the United States. Located at Cranfield Field, Mississippi, no other sequestration project aimed to incorporate as many different geological and technical measurements at a single storage site.
A special section of the October issue of the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control is dedicated to documenting the seven years of research on CCS at Cranfield. The section is a mid-project overview and assessment of the CCS fieldwork, dense data collection, and analysis that still continues there. The section consists of sixteen papers authored by GCCC staff and their colleagues. It opens with a discussion of the Cranfield project design and covers risk assessment, characterization, injection and production activities, as well as monitoring techniques and modeling. The volume was guest-edited by Susan Hovorka, Tip Meckel and JP Nicot.