 UKbenthos Index
|
UK Offshore Oil & Gas Environmental SurveysThis report has been produced as fulfilment of Phase 3 of a project commissioned by the Oil & Gas UK to provide a comprehensive review of seabed environmental surveys carried out by, or on behalf of the UK North Sea offshore operators. The work has been carried out under the guidance of a steering committee composed of industry representatives, the Scottish Executive Fisheries Research Service (FRS) and the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry. The aim of the project has been to locate and catalogue all reports of UKCS environmental surveys carried out by offshore oil and gas operators; to construct a relational database of all chemical and biological data from those reports and to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the data. It is the latter task that is the subject of this report. Environmental surveys have been carried out by UK offshore operators since 1975, initially as part of environmental management programmes and latterly as a statutory obligation. Although theoretically publicly available, the information obtained from these surveys was often difficult to access since there was no infrastructure to enable its dissemination. Some 472 reports have been located out of 511 surveys known to have taken place between 1975 and 1998 and the data incorporated into a database that is now generally available on CD-ROM. This document reports on an independent evaluation of this data, and is the first time all the existing data from offshore monitoring surveys (U.K. Sector) has been available simultaneously for such a purpose. The individual survey reports that provided the source material for the database are held at the Scottish Executive Fisheries Research Service (FRS) marine laboratory in Aberdeen. There have been many studies in the past that have dealt with the impact of offshore oil exploration and development within the U.K. Sector; but these have been largely confined to the immediate vicinity of a particular development. Most of the studies have adopted a localised approach attempting to determine the extent of the 'footprint' resulting from a point source of pollution. This study has adopted a fresh approach, focusing on the wider aspects of oil contamination in the North Sea, concentrating on what is happening in the far field regions (beyond the 5000 metres zone), rather than the area close to the installations where there is already a very large amount of information. The approach that has been adopted has been to: a) take a general view of the whole of the North Sea as a single unit, looking for overall trends; b) look at the northern, central and southern regions as individual units and c) look at individual developments where a time series of data exists. The report contains all the material extracted from the main database that has been used in the analysis. The study concludes that: a) In general there has been no substantial change in the areal extent of hydrocarbon contamination associated with offshore oil operations over the last ten years or zones of impact on the seabed fauna, as measured by diversity indices and b) there is no definite link between macrofaunal community composition and levels of hydrocarbon contamination at distances of 5km and beyond form installations although there is evidence of subtle macrofaunal community change at some locations that coincides with commencement of drilling operations.
In order to view PDF files you will require Adobe Acrobat reader. If you do not have the plug-in, it is free and obtained from the Adobe web site. Please click on the link below to download the plug-in:
|
|
© 2008 The United Kingdom Offshore Oil and Gas Industry Association trading as Oil & Gas UK Registered Office: 2nd Floor, 232-242 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 1AU Company No: 1119804 London: Tel 020 7802 2400 Fax 020 7802 2401 Aberdeen: Tel 01224 577 250 Fax 01224 577 251 Email info@oilandgasuk.co.uk Web http://www.oilandgasuk.co.uk/ Legal and Copyright Issues and Privacy Statement |