Regional oil wildlife response capability in northwest Australia—a collaborative approach by oil and gas operators and agencies

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 455
Author(s):  
Gregory Harrison ◽  
Nick Quinn ◽  
Andrew Best

In January 2012, the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Authority (NOPSEMA) took over the environmental assessment of environmental plans (EP) and oil spill contingency plans (OSCP) in Australia's Commonwealth waters. The requirement to demonstrate capability highlighted several areas of improvement to provide an effective oiled wildlife response (OWLR). An OWL working group was established by several operators with the initial agreement to engage the Australian Marine Oil Spill Centre (AMOSC) as the response agency. The working group of operators has now established an OWLR Plan that was developed in collaboration with AMOSC and the Department of Parks and Wildlife and has provided an industry and government agency coordinated approach to OWLR for the first time.

2008 ◽  
Vol 10 (02) ◽  
pp. 173-187 ◽  
Author(s):  
GAIL S. FRASER ◽  
JOANNE ELLIS

The Environmental Assessment (EA) process should involve the generation of testable predictions generated using clearly stated methods and followed by the collection of environmental monitoring data. Follow-up programs should aim to determine the accuracy of the initial predictions. We examined the follow-up process for six oil and gas extraction projects in eastern Canada with respect to assessing batch spill (< 50 barrels of hydrocarbons and synthetic hydrocarbons) predictions. For three projects we compared oil spill frequency predictions to observed data. All three projects exceeded their predicted frequencies and two projects by ratios (actual to predicted) greater than six. Spill histories from earlier projects, clearly exceeding predictions of future projects, are not provided in subsequent oil and gas EAs for the region, when there were opportunities to do so. We provide recommendations on how to strengthen the quality of EAs and increase protection of the marine environment in Canada.


2019 ◽  
Vol 112 ◽  
pp. 38-47
Author(s):  
Xin Shi ◽  
Ying Wang ◽  
Meifeng Luo ◽  
Changjiang Zhang

2005 ◽  
Vol 2005 (1) ◽  
pp. 861-864
Author(s):  
Nobuhiro Sawano

ABSTRACT Offshore oil and gas developing projects have been started on the Sakhalin shelf and the sea of Okhotsk. These large scale developing projects require multi-national cooperative spill response, then agreements for emergency occasions have to be ratified between neighbor countries under international schemes such as Northwest Pacific Action Plan (NOWPAP) initiated by United Nations Environmental Progamme. As of the moment, there are no diplomatic agreements concerning with oil spill response between stakeholder counties, then custom clearance and other international migration procedure will be an obstacle for exchanging both materials and professionals. A comparative analysis of oil spill contingency plans of Russia, Korea and Japan resulted in some clear differences in these countries approaches. The Korean National Contingency Plan explicitly determines the roles of an ‘on-scene coordinator’ who is a unique organizer for oil spill response. On the other hands, the same kind of Japanese plan does not even contain a word of such ‘on-scene coordinator’. For the Russian case, they have U. S. like Federal Emergency Management Agency, but allocation of roles between this agency and Ministry of Transport are still ambiguous.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (1) ◽  
pp. 1650-1668
Author(s):  
Clément Chazot ◽  
Anton Rhodes

IOSC 2017 Abstract: 2017-269 Abstract The picture today is one of intense oil and gas activity across West, Central and Southern Africa. This is illustrated by the significant increases in crude oil exports over the past fifteen years. This high level of activity has also coincided with, and contributed to, a large increase in the level of shipping in the region. Such level of oil exploration, production, and transportation, means that there exists a threat of oil spills occurring. In response to this risk, the Global Initiative for West, Central, and Southern Africa (GI WACAF) was launched in 2006, with the objective of raising standards of oil spill preparedness and response capability across the region. This paper will describe how the GI WACAF Project cooperates with local stakeholders in order to develop trans-boundary cooperation, and will detail what are the challenges lying ahead in order to make cross-border cooperation fully operational. The analysis of the trans-boundary exercises organised under the umbrella of the GI WACAF Project between Cameroon and Nigeria (2015) on the one hand, and between Gabon and Congo (2015) on the other hand, emphasises the needs in terms of international cooperation, improved communications, integration of response capabilities at the national and regional levels, and the development of effective incident management structures. This paper will show that significant steps have been taken to develop National Oil Spill Contingency Plans across the GI WACAF region and that advances in this area have meant countries are now looking beyond their borders and seeking to integrate national contingency plans with their closest neighbours. Information will be presented concerning the 2015 exercises, the key lessons learned and potential developments of trans-boundary cooperation in the future.


Pollutants ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-28
Author(s):  
Davide Seveso ◽  
Yohan Didier Louis ◽  
Simone Montano ◽  
Paolo Galli ◽  
Francesco Saliu

In light of the recent marine oil spill that occurred off the coast of Mauritius (Indian Ocean), we comment here the incident, the containment method used by the local population, the biological impact of oil spill on two sensitive tropical marine ecosystems (coral reefs and mangrove forests), and we suggest monitoring and restoration techniques of the impacted ecosystems based on recent research advancements.


2021 ◽  
Vol 165 ◽  
pp. 112025
Author(s):  
Jesse Ross ◽  
David Hollander ◽  
Susan Saupe ◽  
Adrian B. Burd ◽  
Sherryl Gilbert ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 1607
Author(s):  
Guannan Li ◽  
Ying Li ◽  
Yongchao Hou ◽  
Xiang Wang ◽  
Lin Wang

Marine oil spill detection is vital for strengthening the emergency commands of oil spill accidents and repairing the marine environment after a disaster. Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (Pol-SAR) can obtain abundant information of the targets by measuring their complex scattering matrices, which is conducive to analyze and interpret the scattering mechanism of oil slicks, look-alikes, and seawater and realize the extraction and detection of oil slicks. The polarimetric features of quad-pol SAR have now been extended to oil spill detection. Inspired by this advancement, we proposed a set of improved polarimetric feature combination based on polarimetric scattering entropy H and the improved anisotropy A12–H_A12. The objective of this study was to improve the distinguishability between oil slicks, look-alikes, and background seawater. First, the oil spill detection capability of the H_A12 combination was observed to be superior than that obtained using the traditional H_A combination; therefore, it can be adopted as an alternate oil spill detection strategy to the latter. Second, H(1 − A12) combination can enhance the scattering randomness of the oil spill target, which outperformed the remaining types of polarimetric feature parameters in different oil spill scenarios, including in respect to the relative thickness information of oil slicks, oil slicks and look-alikes, and different types of oil slicks. The evaluations and comparisons showed that the proposed polarimetric features can indicate the oil slick information and effectively suppress the sea clutter and look-alike information.


2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (02) ◽  
pp. 1250012 ◽  
Author(s):  
FABIENNE LORD ◽  
SETH TULER ◽  
THOMAS WEBLER ◽  
KIRSTIN DOW

Technological hazards research, including that on oil spills and their aftermath, is giving greater attention to human dimension impacts resulting from events and response. While oil spill contingency planners recognize the importance of human dimension impacts, little systematic attention is given to them in contingency plans. We introduce an approach to identifying human dimensions impacts using concepts from hazard and vulnerability assessment and apply it to the Bouchard-120 oil spill in Buzzards Bay, MA. Our assessment covers the spill, emergency response, clean-up, damage assessment, and mid-term recovery. This approach, while still exploratory, did demonstrate that the spill produced a range of positive and negative impacts on people and institutions and that these were mediated by vulnerabilities. We suggest ways in which the framework may help spill managers to learn from events and improve contingency planning by anticipating risks to social systems and identifying strategies to reduce impacts.


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