North Sea Interactive: A decision-support tool to guide environmental monitoring by the oil and gas industry

North Sea Interactive meets all NERC's oil and gas catalyst programme criteria. It has been developed in close consultation with Oil & Gas UK and designed to feed into the Scottish Government's Marine Planning Interactive management tool, itself a valuable resource for the offshore industry. North Sea Interactive translates NERC environmental science from the British Geological Survey (BGS, surficial geology) and National Oceanography Centre (NOC, modelled hydrography) into a new Geographic Information System tool that incorporates the 40-year industry archive of benthic biology in the North Sea Benthos database (Oil & Gas UK/Heriot-Watt University, HWU). North Sea Interactive transfers people from NERC's research base through a series of consultations and secondments with Oil & Gas UK and the Scottish Government. These secondments allow us to develop North Sea Interactive as a practical tool, becoming a valuable Case Study for future development and extension to new exploration and production areas. North Sea Interactive will catalyse new ideas and Joint Industry Projects (JIPs). These include extensions to this project, such as incorporating additional biogeochemical parameters (e.g. pH, highly relevant to cuttings pile stability), through to using the North Sea Interactive approach in new areas such as the Atlantic Margins west of the UK.

North Sea Interactive relies on the long history and close working relationships between its partners and the oil industry. HWU has worked with the offshore industry since the early 1970s. The HWU team has over 60 years combined experience of oil industry projects representing a unique collective experience of compiling and assessing benthic biological data for the oil and gas industry. The University has a strong working relationship with industry evident not only from its Institute of Petroleum Engineering (JIPs income £4.5m pa; JIPs lasting up to 12yrs), but also from the success of its oil industry-related spin-out companies (e.g. Epistemy, Hydrafact, Hydrason, Petroc Technologies, SeeByte). The BGS has an unrivalled position as a valued source of geoscience and regional geological information for the oil industry. Relationships vary from one-off contracts with individual operators to large, long-terms JIPs such as the 1995-2006 Western Frontiers Association (15 companies, £2.7m industry funding) and the 1992-2010 Rockall Consortium (14 companies, £7.34M industry funding). BGS success in such JIPs has catalysed partnerships with international academic consortia, such as the EC STRATAGEM and COSTA programmes.

By providing a single tool that integrates NERC and oil industry environmental data, North Sea Interactive will assist operators in achieving best practicable environmental options (BPEO) for future oil field development, decommissioning options and post-decommissioning monitoring. It is designed to ensure ready access to high-quality NERC environmental data alongside industry datasets so helping companies meet their obligations (e.g. under the OSPAR Commission's national obligations to the 2010-14 Joint Assessment Monitoring Programme and the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive). It provides a model for future JIPs to integrate academic and industry data notably along the Atlantic Margins where there are knowledge gaps in understanding of deep-water ecosystems and vulnerabilities to oil and gas activities.

By creating what we believe will become one of the densest shelf seas datasets integrating biological, geological and hydrodynamic information from industry and academia, North Sea Interactive will become a catalyst for many new ideas and initiatives. As well as future enhancements (e.g. biogeochemical data layers) and expansions (e.g. Atlantic Margin), these include interfacing with regional habitat mapping (e.g. MAREMAP), providing base layers to the renewables industry and raft of potential JIPs around environmental monitoring and decommissioning issues.