CLEAN ATLANTIC ASSOCIATES: AN OIL SPILL CLEANUP COOPERATIVE FOR THE ATLANTIC OFFSHORE AREA

ABSTRACT Clean Atlantic Associates was established by the petroleum operating companies with oil and gas leases in the Mid-Atlantic and South Atlantic areas of the outer continental shelf. As lease sales are held in other Atlantic OCS areas, Clean Atlantic Associates will expand into these areas. The purpose of this association is to provide a stockpile of equipment for member companies to use in the event of an oil spill emergency, and to provide trained manpower to maintain and operate the equipment. To date, about $1.4 million has been spent for containment and cleanup equipment for the Mid-Atlantic area. Another $2.9 million has been authorized for the purchase of additional equipment for the North and South Atlantic lease areas. A base has been established at Davisville, Rhode Island, for the Mid-Atlantic equipment already purchased. Additional bases will be established as needed. The organizational structure of Clean Atlantic Associates and the description and operation of the equipment stockpiled are discussed. New open-sea containment booms, boat spray systems, and modified skimming systems are described in detail. Also discussed are the contingency manual prepared to assist member companies in their planning and training programs, and the training programs held to help assure the availability of trained manpower.

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OIL SPILL CONTINGENCY PLANNING FOR GEORGES BANK

International Oil Spill Conference Proceedings ◽

10.7901/2169-3358-1983-1-121 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 1983 (1) ◽

pp. 121-128

Author(s):

Elmer P. Danenberger ◽

R. Barry Eldridge ◽

Marshall Crocker

Keyword(s):

Rhode Island ◽

Oil Spill ◽

Oil And Gas ◽

Response Times ◽

Coast Guard ◽

Contingency Planning ◽

Management Service ◽

Georges Bank ◽

Outer Continental Shelf ◽

Marine Safety

ABSTRACT Lease Sale #42, held on December 18, 1979, provided the North Atlantic District of the Minerals Management Service (MMS) and the U. S. Coast Guard Marine Safety Office, Boston, an opportunity to develop oil spill contingency planning requirements for companies exploring for oil and gas on Georges Bank, one of the world's most productive fisheries. After extensive consultation with the Coast Guard's Marine Safety Office and Atlantic Strike Team representatives, Clean Atlantic Associates (CAA), an oil industry cleanup cooperative for the Atlantic outer continental shelf, received specific criteria regarding response times, sea-state capabilities, uptake rates, support vessels, storage capabilities, training, and drills. These criteria were developed with the assistance of a technical review board approved by the Commandant of the Coast Guard. CAA met the criteria by purchasing additional response equipment and further demonstrating the capabilities of existing equipment. Response equipment was maintained at two offshore locations to ensure that the specified six-hour response times could be achieved under normal conditions. The offshore response equipment was deployed by drilling personnel at offshore well sites. CAA and the Atlantic Strike Team successfully conducted a coordinated response exercise on July 30, 1981, in Rhode Island Sound. Additional training classes and a surprise offshore drill have been held subsequently.

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An Improved Method to Estimate the Probability of Oil Spill Contact to Environmental Resources in the Gulf of Mexico

Journal of Marine Science and Engineering ◽

10.3390/jmse7020041 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 7 (2) ◽

pp. 41 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Zhen Li ◽

Walter Johnson

Keyword(s):

Gulf Of Mexico ◽

Oil Spill ◽

Oil And Gas ◽

Current Data ◽

Environmental Resources ◽

Ocean Energy ◽

Outer Continental Shelf ◽

Socioeconomic Resources ◽

The U.S

The oil spill risk analysis (OSRA) model is a tool used by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to evaluate oil spill risks to biological, physical, and socioeconomic resources that could be exposed to oil spill contact from oil and gas leasing, exploration, or development on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Using long-term hindcast winds and ocean currents, the OSRA model generates hundreds of thousands of trajectories from hypothetical oil spill locations and derives the probability of contact to these environmental resources in the U.S. OCS. This study generates probability of oil spill contact maps by initiating trajectories from hypothetical oil spill points over the entire planning areas in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico (GOM) OCS and tabulating the contacts over the entire waters in the GOM. Therefore, a probability of oil spill contact database that stores information of the spill points and contacts can be created for a given set of wind and current data such that the probability of oil spill contact to any environmental resources from future leasing areas can be estimated without a rerun of the OSRA model. The method can be applied to other OCS regions and help improve BOEM’s decision-making process.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTINGENCY MEASURES IN DETERMINING OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF OIL AND GAS DEVELOPMENT

International Oil Spill Conference Proceedings ◽

10.7901/2169-3358-1981-1-571 ◽

1981 ◽

Vol 1981 (1) ◽

pp. 571-575

Author(s):

Raymond R. Emerson

Keyword(s):

Oil Spill ◽

Environmental Risk ◽

Oil And Gas ◽

Oil Spills ◽

Contingency Planning ◽

Outer Continental Shelf ◽

Production Potential ◽

Oil And Gas Development ◽

Site Specific ◽

The U.S

ABSTRACT Oil spills are one of the major concerns associated with oil and gas development along the outer continental shelf. The U.S. Department of the Interior is presently planning lease sales at the rate of seven per year. Many of these leases are being proposed in areas where the risks associated with oil spills are difficult to assess. The major objective of the decisionmakers in this process is to select a leasing plan from the list of proposed blocks that will offer the maximum production potential within an acceptable level of environmental risk. This objective can be obtained with proper contingency planning which should include site-specific designs. A proposed leasing plan could be limited in its production potential by the habitats more vunerable to a potential oil spill. These areas are identified using a model system developed by the U.S. Geological Survey. In this model, the local meteorology and physical oceanography are coupled to produce trajectories of hypothetical oil spills. These trajectories, along with oil resource estimates, are used to establish overall probabilities of an oil spill contacting specific coastal areas and habitats. Using linear programming techniques, the blocks that can yield the maximum resource recovery within specified limits of environmental risk are identified. Site-specific contingency measures (such as stockpiles of cleanup equipment) concentrated at the more vulnerable habitats will allow the decisionmaker to accept a higher level of environmental risk and significantly increase the number of blocks that are suitable for leasing. A proposed lease sale area for the northeast Gulf of Alaska is used to demonstrate the importance of contingency planning in determining various levels of offshore oil and gas resource development.

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STATISTICAL ESTIMATES OF SHORELINE OIL CONTACT IN THE GULF OF MEXICO

International Oil Spill Conference Proceedings ◽

10.7901/2169-3358-2005-1-547 ◽

2005 ◽

Vol 2005 (1) ◽

pp. 547-551 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Walter R. Johnson ◽

Zhen-Gang Ji ◽

Charles F. Marshall

Keyword(s):

Wind Speed ◽

Gulf Of Mexico ◽

Oil Spill ◽

Wind Field ◽

Oil And Gas ◽

Ocean Current ◽

Management Service ◽

Outer Continental Shelf ◽

Statistical Estimates ◽

Level Of Concern

ABSTRACT As steward of the Federal offshore lands known as the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), Minerals Management Service (MMS), is responsible for balancing the Nation's search for commercial oil and gas with protection of the human and marine environments. The MMS regulates the development of mineral resources in an environmentally safe manner by analyzing environmental consequences of the OCS program prior to lease sales or approval of industry's plans. The Oil-Spill Risk Analysis (OSRA) model was developed by the DOI for the analysis of possible oil-spill impact from offshore oil and gas operations. The OSRA model produces statistical estimates of hypothetical oil-spill occurrence and contact from projected OCS operations. The model generates an ensemble of sea surface oil-spill trajectories by initiating thousands of oil-spill simulations at hypothetical spill locations to statistically characterize oil-spill risk in areas of prospective drilling and production and along projected pipeline routes. The hypothetical spills are initiated every day and move at the velocity of the vector sum of the surface ocean currents plus an empirical wind-induced drift of speed equal to 3.5% of the local wind speed, with a wind-speed-dependent direction (Samuels et al., 1982). The model generates oil-spill trajectories by integrating interpolated values of the wind and ocean current fields at intervals short enough to use the full spatial resolution of the ocean current and wind fields. The OSRA model, as applied to the Gulf of Mexico, uses 3-hourly ocean current fields over 7 years (1993–1999) generated by the Princeton Regional Ocean Forecast System (PROFS) (Oey et al., 2004). The PROFS is driven by synoptic winds, heat flux, and river flows. The wind field is based on the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts surface winds enhanced by observations from meteorological buoys and Coastal-Marine Automated Network stations. The same wind field used to force the ocean model is used to move the oil in the spill trajectories. As an example of environmental assessment, the OSRA model was used to estimate the spreading of oil spills by simultaneously modeling fractions of each spill, referred to as spillets. The spillets were used to calculate additional statistics, in particular, the length of coastline contacted by a large spill. The coastline was divided into equal length segments. Assumptions were made regarding what fraction of the spill (i.e., the number of spillets) that contacted a land segment would constitute a contact larger than the “level of concern.” Sensitivity of the analysis to key assumed parameters, such as the number of spillets and the level of concern, were tested.

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