This proposal responds to the call Next generation of scientific instrumentation, tools and methods (2022) (HORIZON-INFRA-2022-TECH-01). The proposal seeks to directly address the challenges to develop a new world-class research instrument integrating already existing NREN and EPOS infrastructures and Copernicus Marine service, from three European nations, as well as Pan-European and Pan-American institutions, to disseminate FAIR compliant State of Polarisation and Distributed Acoustic Sensor data, gathered from the same, already installed, live, telecommunications submarine optical fibres, in a temporally consistent and geographically dispersed way. Such an instrument would deliver innovative scientific instrumentation, methods and tools as well as advancing the involved research infrastructures by developing new state of the art services and long-term data sets of unique scientific value.

This project will enable continuous recording of these types of data for research use by NRENs for the first time, thus supporting of diverse academic, industrial and governmental user communities. Through the integration with EPOS data infrastructure , existing research communities in solid earth (EPOS) and marine science (EMSO), industrial and public body communities can be complimented with entirely new types of data sets unavailable to them before, which it is believed will lead to new areas of research.

SUBMERSE (SUBMarine cablEs for ReSearch and Exploration) is an innovative EU-funded project which aims to utilise existing submarine cables, already used by the research and education networking community, to monitor the Earth and its systems. By utilising existing equipment and infrastructure in a new way, the project not only avoids the need for extra hardware under the sea, but also improves the return on investment by enhancing and widening its use.

 

All partners are excited to begin work on this highly innovative project. We have an opportunity here to do something really quite amazing, making use of existing infrastructure to provide a world of new data and, together with the research communities making use of this data, potentially make new discoveries!

 

European Innovation Council under Grant SUBMERSE: 101095055

Description: 

Tsunamis are one of the most deadly and destructive natural forces threatening the lives of hundreds of millions of people in coastal areas and Small Island Developing States. Most of these communities, with the exception of a few rich countries like Japan and the United States, cannot afford current tsunami early warning systems. The EIC-funded SAFE project proposes a straightforward, low-cost, easy and reliable solution that takes advantage of the broadly available infrastructure of submarine fibre-optic cables widely used for communication. The system will be simply deployed by connecting an interrogator to the dry end of the fibre-optic cable and will allow the fastest possible life-saving alerts.

Objetive: 

According to the World Health Organization, more than 700 million people live in low-lying coastal areas and Small Island Developing States exposed to extreme sea-level events including tsunamis. The cost of the most reliable currently-available tsunami warning systems (based on offshore sensors) is extremely high and essentially only affordable to rich countries like the US or Japan. As such, the vast majority of all this endangered population is not yet protected by this type of tsunami warning system. Luckily, the vast majority of these coastal areas have already-available fibre-optic cables installed (for communication purposes) which could additionally serve as a key component for tsunami early warning, at a marginal extra cost. The objective of this project is to fulfill the need of protecting these communities, which often have limited resources, by providing a tsunami early warning solution based on the already-available fibre optic infrastructure. The solution provided in this project will be simple to deploy and maintain (just connecting an interrogator in the dry end of the fiber-optic cable), low cost (it will be several orders of magnitude cheaper than current systems), reliable (tsunami alerts will be confirmed by the same device using indirect measurements of sea level) and timely (the response time is expected to be faster than current systems). The main market of this solution will be official meteorological and environmental institutions of different countries responsible for issuing early warnings.

European Innovation Council under Grant SAFE: ref. 101098992

The scientific evidence of climate change has led to new energy policies with the goal of a carbon neutral economy this century. One path to decrease our carbon footprint involves strategies to increase renewable energy production. Green/Blue Hydrogen are envisioned as key players for energy-intensive sectors such as industry, road freight, shipping and aviation. Hydrogen can also store energy from excess generation of facilities like wind or solar farms. However, intermittent nature of renewable energy production requires large accumulated reserves possibly as Underground Hydrogen Storage (UHS). Although growing production of renewables is mandatory towards climate-change mitigation, scientific reports call for complementary measures where a key player is Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) stored in underground geological formations.

All those storage projects will necessarily be scaled as complex multi-decadal operation with large capital investments, and their implementation will require development of novel technologies solutions, many yet untested.

TREMORS will provide a technological solution for an operational major challenge, still little appreciated in industry, but long recognised in academia. Fluid injection changes the natural state of stresses in the crust and generates earthquakes. The frequency and magnitude of the seismicity is variable and difficult to predict, but relates to the rate of fluid injection, which can be modulated with warning mechanism. Earthquake generation has four major issues that need to be mitigated for successful storage. First, natural seismicity must be studied to evaluate fault activity that might cause a large event. Second, injection might trigger slip on dormant faults. Third, even if no large events occur, induced small magnitude seismicity might compromise the integrity of the underground storage facilitating leakage. Finally, a fourth scenario is moderate induced seismicity causing social alarm. One or several of the 4 scenarios will cause project termination during planning, development or operation. To diminish risk, it appears that most storage sites will be located offshore, far from populated areas. However, offshore environments make particularly challenging to properly monitoring seismicity to be able to undertake appropriate measures to avoid a project termination. In spite of this impending need, there is no available monitoring system that properly performs the prevention service.

TREMORS combines the know-how of groups of engineers and geophysicists to build the first integral system for offshore real-time high-resolution seismic monitoring. To meet the regulatory and safety requirements, the new system represents a quantum leap compared to any system previously used for onshore seismic studies. Monitoring will combine the use of optical fibre cables as thousands of sensors buried under the seafloor, with the detection capabilities of an improved Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) system, and a Big Data approach with tailored Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, to detect, analyse and locate seismicity. The monitoring system will map even minuscule events that provide critical information to evaluate natural hazards during site selection and later during operation, so that the corresponding precautionary measures during injection can be emplaced, before the outbreak of a seismic crisis may compromise the storage integrity or cause social alarm.

Repsol strategic plan commits on the generation of renewable energy and to a net-zero carbon footprint for 2050. Repsol is also one of the few national and international companies with the know-how to tackle the bold enterprise of underground storage. Their leadership and coordination of TREMORS warrants a swift technological transfer of the results from a prototype to industry standard, turning a major problem into a business opportunity, and solving one of the pending issues in our path towards a carbon neutral economy.

Submarine cables currently carry 98% of international Internet traffic. We rely globally on this technology to communicate, conduct financial transactions and transmit information securely. Although submarine cables are a highly secure technology, it is extremely important to have effective maintenance systems in place to guarantee the operation of the infrastructure and to deal with any incidents caused by natural and human phenomena (e.g. anchor strikes by ships).

In this scenario, systems that ensure the protection and predictive maintenance of submarine cable infrastructures (PSI), such as the one developed by the public-private consortium comprising AFR-IX telecom, the University of Alcalá, the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) and Aragón Photonics, are key to guaranteeing data transmission.