USA - Accidental oil spill in the Norwegian Arctic

Off-shore oil exploration and production is moving towards Arctic regions, where knowledge about the environmental impact of such activities is extremely limited. As a result, petroleum operations in the "Barents Sea area", have strict environmental regul ations, i.e. a "zero discharge framework". Most operational discharges are prohibited and potential environmental impacts are related to accidents (i.e. massive and small repeated discharges related to oil spill events in the course of production, process ing, or transport). To plan for, and develop appropriate response proc edures for these events, the biological effects, both direct and indirect, must be known and understood. These involve biological effects on individual organisms from invertebrates to fish, birds and mammals. Akvaplan-niva's section on environment and petroleum research focuses on these issues with three currently funded NFR (PROOF programme) research grants addressing biological impacts of O&G activities in the Arctic on water column (No 157649/720), benthos (No 159016/S40), and ice margin (No 164407). This pre-project to the Bilateral Research Cooperation Programme (BILAT) is aimed at establishing a collaboration with NOAA and the USGS- both leading scientific authorities on the lon term biological impacts of oil spills on the Arctic marine ecosystem. We intend to first conduct a site visit to the NOAA & USGS to gain expertise from their research team by addressing 10 questions to identify knowledge gaps within the Barents Sea contex t and to identify and develop the best available techniques, equipment and materials for minimizing impacts on the environment from oil spills in the Aarctic and su-Arctic. The post visit phase will involve follow up communications to agree on a short lis t of target areas worth pursuing further, notably on exchange of scientists (students) and methods/techniques and development of joint research proposal.