Advanced environmental monitoring solutions for the oil and gas industry in the Atlantic Frontier

法罗群岛设得兰群岛盆地和北海北方正在进行大西洋边缘的勘探和生产，在罗卡尔坚韧和哈顿盆地以及该地区英国大部分未发现的资源中具有可行或可能的石油前景（DECC，2009年）。在这些生物丰富、多产但敏感的地区开展业务，将在数据有限的环境中进行，这些环境与首次开发环境评估方法的浅水系统非常不同：因此，在这一前沿环境中，互利的科学-工业联合伙伴关系有着明确的空间。工业作业附近的底栖生物变化可能有多种原因。这可能会混淆影响评估和监测进程：成熟北海盆地的底栖生物显示出深刻的时空变化，但使用标准多元统计数据，无法从其他潜在的变化因素中清楚地辨别出工业影响（金斯顿等人，2001年）。最近NERC和行业资助的研究使用更复杂的方法重新访问了这些数据，发现区域远场底栖生物的变化往往更多地是对海洋学而不是工业活动的反应。NERC的研究还显示，在东北大西洋深处也有类似的时间变化（Hartman等人，2012年）。与北海不同，大西洋边缘的石油和天然气生产很少，并提供了独特的机会，在大规模钻井和生产开始之前获得基线环境变异性的措施。环境监测和联合王国发现或减轻与工业有关的变化的能力对联合王国的部门、邻国和世界各地的类似环境都很重要。如果不了解自然环境变化及其如何引起海底动物群落的变化，就很难适当地评估、监测或减轻该行业的潜在影响。NERC的EEL、NEMO和BGS沉积物数据可以为该行业提供有关大西洋边缘海洋温度、盐度、海底应力、沉积物颗粒大小和金属浓度的无与伦比的档案，所有这些都影响着海底生物多样性。NERC数据将支持我们新的地理信息系统工具，该工具将通过增加来自英国底栖生物数据库（英国石油和天然气），SERPENT项目（NOC），AFEN，DTI-SEA调查和西部边境协会（BGS）的底栖生物，沉积物和化学数据来增强。这些地图和对SEA 4区域底栖生物群落基线变化的新测量将使我们能够提出明确的循证监测建议。最终，它将帮助运营商和监管机构等最终用户在这一经济重要、生物多样性和生态敏感的地区实现安全和环境可持续的运营。该行业需要快速和定期评估环境影响的工具，以履行联合王国对《保护东北大西洋海洋环境公约》（《保护东北大西洋海洋环境公约》，2010年）和《欧盟海洋战略框架指令》（2008/56/EC;《海洋战略框架指令》）的义务。《海洋可持续发展框架》的良好环境状况标准必须使联合王国能够评估“压力的规模、分布和强度以及不同生态系统组成部分的范围、脆弱性和复原力，包括在可能的情况下绘制地图，从而能够确定海洋生态系统已经或可能受到不利影响的地区”（欧共体，2010年）。只有通过了解和说明环境和生物可变性的自然水平的监测方案，才有可能履行这些义务。通过将NERC无与伦比的海洋学时间序列和地质覆盖范围与其他数据相融合，我们的项目将通过确保实施适当的监测协议，协助用户帮助英国履行OSPAR和欧盟MFSD规定的环境义务。

Exploration and production in the Atlantic Margin are underway in the Faroe Shetland Basin and northern North Sea, with viable or possible petroleum prospects in the Rockall Tough and Hatton Basin, and much of the UK's undiscovered sources in the region (DECC, 2009). Operations in these biologically rich, productive but sensitive areas will occur in data-limited environments very different to the shallow-water systems where environmental assessment methods were first developed: thus, there is clear scope for mutually beneficial joint Science-Industry partnerships in this frontier environment. Benthic biological changes near industry operations can occur for many reasons. This can confound the impact assessment and monitoring process: benthos in the mature North Sea basin show profound spatial and temporal changes, but industry effects could not be clearly discerned from other potential agents of change using standard multivariate statistics (Kingston et al. 2001). Recent NERC and industry-funded research re-visited these data using more sophisticated methods, finding that regional far-field benthos often changed more in response to oceanography than to industry activity. NERC research also shows similar temporal changes in the deep northeast Atlantic (Hartman et al., 2012). Unlike the North Sea, the Atlantic Margin experiences little oil and gas production and offers unique opportunities to obtain measures of baseline environmental variability before large-scale drilling and production begins. Environmental monitoring and the UK's capacity to detect or mitigate industry-related changes are important in the UK sector, to neighbouring countries and to comparable settings worldwide. Without an understanding of natural environmental variability and how this induces change in seafloor faunal communities, it will be very difficult to appropriately assess, monitor, or mitigate potential impacts of the industry.NERC's EEL, NEMO, and BGS sediment data can provide the industry with an unsurpassed archive of ocean temperatures, salinities, seabed stress, sediment particle size and metal concentrations across the Atlantic Margin, all of which influence benthic biodiversity. NERC data will underpin our new GIS tool that will be enhanced by addition of benthic biological, sediment and chemical data from the UK Benthos database (Oil and Gas UK), the SERPENT project (NOC), AFEN, DTI-SEA surveys, and the Western Frontiers Association (BGS). These maps and new measures of baseline variability in benthic communities from the SEA4 area will permit us to make clear evidence-based recommendations for monitoring. Ultimately it will help end users such as operators and regulators achieve safe and environmentally sustainable operations in this economically important, biologically diverse and ecologically sensitive region. The industry needs tools to rapidly and regularly appraise environmental impacts to meet the UK's obligations to OSPAR (OSPAR, 2010) and the EU Marine Strategy Framework Directive (2008/56/EC; MSFD). The MSFD's criteria of good environmental status must result in the UK being able to assess the "scale, distribution and intensity of the pressures and the extent, vulnerability and resilience of the different ecosystem components including where possible their mapping, [which] allows the identification of areas where marine ecosystems have or may have been adversely affected" (EC, 2010). Meeting those obligations will only be possible through monitoring programmes that understand and account for natural levels of environmental and biological variability. By fusing NERC's unsurpassed oceanographic time-series and geological coverage with other data, our project will assist users in helping the UK meet its environmental obligations under OSPAR and the EU MFSD by ensuring that appropriate monitoring protocols are implemented.