An integrated approach to environmental decision-making for offshore oil and gas operations

A brief overview is given of a research program on environmental risks associated with offshore oil and gas industry discharges. The research has two major thrusts: development of environmental risk assessment and risk management methods, and development of underwater vehicle technology for scientific and monitoring missions. This paper focuses on the former. The project is a joint venture between the Ocean Engineering Research Centre at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the Institute for Marine Dynamics of the National Research Council Canada, with the support of several Canadian companies and universities. This paper describes several elements of the project: (a) the development of a risk management methodology for drilling waste discharges in the marine environment, (b) development of a probabilistic hydrodynamic model and risk-based design procedure for produced water discharges, (c) performance characteristics of several candidate sensors for environmental effects monitoring, (d) laboratory investigation of the settling characteristics of drill cuttings, (e) evaluation of various offshore treatment technologies for drilling waste using multi-criteria decision-making, and (f) evaluation of air emissions associated with the offshore petroleum industry and environmental management practice to mitigate the impacts. The ultimate goal of the research is to integrate current and emerging scientific knowledge and technology with the goals of environmental protection and their associated costs in a holistic framework to guide decision-making under uncertainty.