Monitoring Subsurface

Monitoring of subsurface injections is important of maintaining regulatory requirements, community license to operate, mitigating problems and evaluating performance.

CSIRO has expertise in monitoring subsurface injection for hydraulic fractures, sequestration, energy storage, gas storage via means of,

  • tiltmeters
  • fibreoptic
  • geophones
  • pressure tomography
  • trace gas monitoring 

Recent Monitoring Projects / Deployed Tiltmeter Arrays

  • 2017 – LKAB Kiruna
  • 2017 – LKAB Malmberget
  • 2021 – BMA Broadmeadow
  • 2022 – OzMinerals Carrapeteena
  • 2022 – CSIRO In-Situ Laboratory (https://research.csiro.au/in-situ/)
  • 2023 – Whitehaven Narrabri
  • 2023 – Quidnet Energy

Monitoring Portal

CSIRO has developed a bespoke online monitoring portal fractura online (https://fractura.csiro.au).

The web interface connects sensors deployed in the field for monitoring of subsurface injections (energy storage/preconditioning/cave inducement) to engineers and ready cloud based computing power. The portal improves times from undertaking site operations to completing analysis, reduces data errors and reduces the need for technicians on site.

Includes features such as:

  • Live monitoring of surface sensor data
  • Data visualisation of tiltmeter data, raw data and vector
  • Cloud based inversions requests
  • Traffic light style preconditioning reports (red = poor, orange = OK, green = Good preconditioning coverage)