Sustained autonomous environmental monitoring of offshore oil fields

NERC and NOC are at the forefront of the development of innovative methods to improve observations in the oceans using robotic systems such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles. These robots have allowed scientists to gain important insights to the distribution of life in different marine habitats in unprecedented detail and understand more about the processes that explain where the animals are found. Marine habitats are under increasing pressure from many different human impacts; e.g. fishing, pollution and mineral resource extraction but NERC's research developing innovative monitoring methods has the potential to help industry to improve environmental data collection and monitoring to mitigate environmental impacts.

In this Innovation Partnership project we propose to work with the hydrocarbon company Hurricane Energy Plc. We will spend four months working in the company to explore the use of the latest marine robots and other autonomous systems developed by NERC and NOC as well as commercially available systems to improve the quality of information acquired from environmental surveys. The objective is to exchange knowledge with Hurricane to help increase the quality and efficiency of these surveys. There will be a phase of the project in which we work directly with Hurricane Energy's environmental manager to determine their requirements. This will be followed by a phase in which we propose a series of options based on different types of technology to address their environmental data collection challenges. These will be compared with conventional methods of environmental data collection to enable Hurricane to make informed choices and will include liaison with the industry regulators.

The project draws on experience working with industry to incorporate MAS into routine operations and emergency response to oil spills (NE/P013228/1) and environmental monitoring of decommissioned oil and gas infrastructure (NE/P016561/1). It will also make use of real-world experience from scientific AUV and fixed-point observatory use; in particular on the NOC's development of pioneering methods to assess spatial ecology of benthic habitats e.g. NERC AESA project NE/H021787/1 and time-series monitoring of the Haig Fras Marine Protected Area, surveys of Rockall Bank and long-term monitoring at the Porcupine Abyssal Plain through the NERC Sustained Observing Programme. It also gains from NOC's existing collaborative project with Hurricane Energy through their participation in the NOC led SERPENT Project (use of industry remotely operated vehicles during stand-by time for scientific study).

This work is particularly relevant and timely as Hurricane Energy develop the Greater Lancaster Area and will begin explooration of the Greater Warwick Area, West of Shetland, UK.