Introduction
exploration of petroleum and gas deposits is immediately a global industrial activity in the deep ocean. As easily accessible anoint and gas resources became consume, and engineering improved, the oil and gas industry expanded into deep waters in recent decades ( Figure 1 ). however, this deep-water expansion has not always been matched by legislation that reflects modern practices of environmental conservation. There is a clear need to bring together current cognition of deep-sea ecology, known homo impacts on deep-water ecosystems, and the confused environmental protection measures that exist to date .
FIGURE 1
Figure 1. Potentially petroliferous offshore zones and regional distribution of proven offshore oil and gas reserves. Adapted from Pinder ( 2001 ) .
numerous and vary regulations related to the management of the hydrocarbon industry exist in different nautical jurisdictions and for areas beyond national legal power ( ABNJ or the “ Area ” ; Mazor et al., 2014 ; Katsanevakis et al., 2015 ). individual state states may manage activities within their exclusive economic zones ( EEZs ), complemented by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea ( UNCLOS ; note that the U.S.A. has not ratified the Convention ) considering mineral extraction activities outside EEZs. such regulations may, for example, set out the framework for environmental appraisal and monitor, define particular habitats, and/or species that should be afforded particular protection, and define the boundaries of areas designated for spatial management. however, there has not however been a significant attempt to standardize regulations across EEZs or to develop regional management organizations as exist for high-seas fisheries management .
application of management strategies in the bass ocean is complicated by the unique ecological proscenium on which they play out ( Jumars and Gallagher, 1982 ). biological systems in the trench sea operate at a notably slower pace than in shallow waters ( Smith, 1994 ). many deep-sea species typically have first gear metabolic rates, slow growth rates, late adulthood, low levels of recruitment, and long liveliness spans ( McClain and Schlacher, 2015 ). many deep-sea habitats besides harbor diverse faunal assemblages that are composed of a relatively bombastic proportion and issue of rare species at low abundances ( Glover et al., 2002 ). In some habitats ( for example, hydrothermal vents ) species can re-colonize relatively quickly after disturbance ( Van Dover, 2014 ), but in most other deep-sea ecosystems, convalescence can be very slow ( Williams et al., 2010 ; Vanreusel et al., 2016 ). These attributes make deep-sea species and assemblages sensitive to anthropogenetic stressors, with low resilience to disturbances from human activities ( Schlacher et al., 2014 ; Clark et al., 2016 ) .
here, we seek to synthesize current information on typical impacts from offshore vegetable oil and natural gas operations and review existing management strategies and regulations in order to provide the basis for a determine of recommendations for a generalized management strategy to limit environmental impacts attributable to the deep-water ( > 200 megabyte ) vegetable oil and gasoline industry. protective measures can include spatial management ( i.e., spatial restrictions, marine protected areas ), activeness management ( i.e., restrictions to diligence methods ), and temporal management ( i.e., temp or seasonal worker restrictions ). These forms of management have been implemented and enforced with varying degrees of success in a number of jurisdictions. Given the highly variable nature of local anesthetic management regulations, some individual deep-water vegetable oil and accelerator diligence operators have adopted in-house best practice approaches and/or imported operating constraints from other jurisdictions to limit their indebtedness in regions with little or no management system in station. however, there remains no standard set of best practice approaches that has broad-based support .
Deep-Water Oil and Gas Industry
Industrial exploitation of oil and gas reserves has occurred in shallow marine areas since 1897, when the wells drilled at ocean from piers in Summerland, California, foremost produced petroleum ( Hyne, 2001 ). By the 1960s, this drill had moved into deeper offshore areas as well accessible resources declined, technology for offshore drilling improved, and bombastic reserves of hydrocarbons were discovered. presently, drilling for petroleum and boast is everyday in all offshore environments, with major deep-water ( > 200 molarity ) production in areas such as the Arctic, northern North Atlantic Ocean ( UK and norwegian waters ), East and West Africa, Gulf of Mexico, South America, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia ( Figure 1 ). Ultra-deep-water ( > 1000 megabyte ) production is still in its early stages and is likely to increase in the coming years, with the most active exploitation in the Gulf of Mexico, where major reserves are being accessed in waters equally deep as 3000 m. Gas-hydrate extraction is still in the development phase, and while many of the conclusions and recommendations included here could be applied to that nascent industry, we do not explicitly consider those activities here .
deep-water exploration involves multiple steps ( Kark et al., 2015 ), typically starting with acoustic outback detection ( seismic surveys ) to understand the subsurface geology and likely hydrocarbon reservoir architecture ( Gausland, 2003 ). If desirable targets are detected, one or more exploration wells are drilled to ground-truth the interpretation of the acoustic data and determine the nature of the reservoir. If economically recoverable hydrocarbon reserves are located, the web site may advance to product ( Hyne, 2001 ). This typically involves the drilling of one or more appraisal wells followed by several production wells and the initiation of versatile surface ( for example, floating production, repositing, and offloading vessels ) and subsea infrastructure ( for example, manifolds, operate cables, and export lines ). An example of a boastfully deep-water mathematical process is the BP Greater Plutonio playing field off Angola, which covers an area of 140 km2 and consists of 43 wells in water depths of 1200–1500 m. once a sphere is operational ( this may take respective years to complete ), hydrocarbons are exported via pipelines and/or tankers. Additional drill may be required as the field develops, either to expand the battlefield or to enhance vegetable oil or accelerator recovery ( Boesch and Rabalais, 1987 ) .
In deep-water settings, drill is typically from semi-submersible rigs or drill ships that hold post by anchors or moral force placement ( Figure 2 ). In a production field, the assorted wells are connected together with a series of pipes and manipulate cables ( Hyne, 2001 ). Individual wells may be 1 thousand in diameter, and are much several kilometers in duration. Drilling an individual well may take between 1 and 3 months. The bore process involves the practice of fluids that perform a issue of different functions ( for example, providing hydrostatic pressure, cool, and cleaning the bore, carrying exercise cuttings, limiting corrosion, lubrication ). The fluid may be seawater or a combination of chemicals much referred to as drilling mud ( see Sections below ). A sword pipe, known as the shell, is pushed into the well behind the drill and finally cemented in identify ( Hyne, 2001 ). typically, for the first section of the well, which may extend 600 megabyte into the sediment, there is no retentiveness of the drill cuttings ( the fragments of rock that have been drilled ) and these are pushed to the seafloor open through the casing with the drilling fluent, and form a “ cuttings pile ” ( Jones et al., 2006 ). once this foremost section ( the “ tophole ” ) is completed and cemented in identify, a blow-out preventer ( BOP ) is installed at the ocean floor ( Hyne, 2001 ). The BOP contains a series of valves controlling the well, and once it is in position, the well is efficaciously sealed and the bore fluids and cuttings can be recirculated to the swindle for process and recycling. Following work to reduce or eliminate anoint contentedness and stabilize and/or solidify the waste, drill cuttings can be discharged overboard, may be shipped to shore for far work and disposal, or re-injected into the ocean floor ( Boesch and Rabalais, 1987 ; Ball et al., 2012 ) .
FIGURE 2
Figure 2. Primary sediment discharges made during exploration drilling activity in deepwater. These effects are about identical whether a semi-submersible rig ( as shown ) or a drillship is used for drilling .
Assessment of Environmental Impacts
environmental impacts of petroleum and gas operations may influence species, populations, assemblages, or ecosystems by modifying a variety show of ecological parameters ( for example, biodiversity, biomass, productivity, and so forth ). At the visualize flush, potential impacts are generally assessed through some type of formal process, termed an environmental affect judgment ( EIA ). These typically involve the designation, prediction, evaluation, and extenuation of impacts prior to the start of a undertaking. Key standard components of an EIA admit : ( one ) description of the proposed development, including information about the size, location, and duration of the project, ( two ) baseline description of the environment, ( three ) description of potential impacts on the environment, ( four ) proposed moderation of impacts, and ( five ) recognition of cognition gaps. extenuation in current vegetable oil and gasoline projects is recommended to follow the extenuation hierarchy : keep off, minimize, restore, and offset ( World Bank, 2012 ). environmental management strategies, peculiarly those to avoid and minimize the environmental impacts of projects, are set during the EIA summons and may become conditions of operation. As a result, this component of the EIA process is peculiarly important in preemptively avoiding serious impacts to the marine environment ( Beanlands and Duinker, 1984 ). Establishing appropriate service line data and control reference sites are critical to both an effective EIA development and subsequent judgment and monitoring of EIA predictions .
EIAs include predictions of how an ecological “ baseline ” condition may change in reception to development and activities. Regulatory bodies broadly offer advice on the appropriate assessment of potential impacts on ecological parameters such as biodiversity. For exemplar, the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs ( DEFRA ) suggests consideration of : ( i ) gains or losses in the variety of species, ( two ) gains or losses in the assortment and abundance within species, ( three ) gains or losses in the amount of space for ecosystems and habitats, ( four ) gains or losses in the physical connection of ecosystems and habitats, and ( vanadium ) environmental changes within ecosystems and habitats. The DEFRA advice notes that the appraisal of biodiversity will inevitably require some baseline cognition against which to assess a proposed growth and any electric potential impingement that may result .
The dependability of EIA predictions depends largely on the quality of existing ecological data ( for example, spatial and temporal role coverage, measures of natural pas seul, taxonomic resolution, types of animal observed, and collected, etc. ) and empirical data or model predictions of how ecological features react to human stressors. even in the best-known deep-sea environments, the need for planned, coherent, and consistent ecological data to inform EIAs may necessitate significant new survey operations. For model, within the UK EEZ, the Faroe-Shetland Channel has been the subject of across-the-board oceanographic investigations since the late 1800s ( for example, Thomson, 1873 ). however, the petroleum diligence and the UK ‘s regulative bodies considered it appropriate to undertake a major regional-scale sketch of the deep-water environment at the attack of diligence activity ( Mordue, 2001 ). In the Gulf of Mexico, region-wide assessments of deep-sea community structure are available for unlike groups of fauna ( e.g., Rowe and Menzel, 1971 ; Cordes et al., 2006, 2008 ; Rowe and Kennicutt, 2008 ; Demopoulos et al., 2014 ; Quattrini et al., 2014 ). however, following the Deepwater Horizon incident, baseline data were placid found to be lacking in the contiguous vicinity of the impacts, and for many key components of the ecosystem, including microbial communities and processes ( Joye et al., 2016 ). This is reflected in the chief recommendation of a late review ( Turrell et al., 2014 ) that assessed the science needed to respond to a UK deep-water oil spill, which highlighted the indigence for the development of robust “ physical, chemical, and biological baselines ” in deep-water petroleum and gas production areas .
Testing EIA predictions and the effectiveness of enforced extenuation measures with well-designed and consistent environmental monitor is a critical next step. Generally, some human body of “ before-after/control-impact ” ( BACI ) monitor approach is appropriate ( Underwood, 1994 ), as this will enable the detection of accidental impacts in addition to impacts anticipated from typical operations ( Wiens and Parker, 1995 ; Iversen et al., 2011 ). however, this much receives less attention and resources than the EIA itself, and most jurisdictions have minimal requirements for monitoring programs ( table 1 ). long-run monitor in the deep ocean is broadly rare ( for example, Hartman et al., 2012 ), and long-run environmental monitor of deep-water vegetable oil and gas developments is extremely restrict. A significant exception is found in the two lookout systems that were installed in trench waters off Angola to record long-run natural and anthropogenetic changes in the physical, chemical, and biological environment and to allow an sympathy of the pace of recovery from unanticipated impacts ( Vardaro et al., 2013 ). monitor should besides be carried out after production has ceased and throughout de-commissioning. For case, in Norway such monitor is required at 3-year intervals during the production phase and following the cessation of production ( Iversen et al., 2011 ) .
table 1
Table 1. Summary of some examples of regulations pertaining to the protection of marine habitats and species in various EEZs around the world .
aside from project-specific EIAs, environmental assessments may besides take place at broader ( for example, regional or national ) levels, for example in the shape of Strategic Environmental Assessments ( SEAs ). such broad assessments may cover a single industrial sector or multiple sectors, and may involve broad analyses of environmental and socio-economic impacts of development plans. These assessments are typically aimed at assisting regulative bodies with identifying development options that can achieve both sustainable use and national and external conservation goals ( Noble, 2000 ; Jay, 2010 ). Despite the recognized profit of integrating strategic/regional assessments into the planning and management serve, their application in offshore activeness planning is distillery relatively limited ( noble et al., 2013 ). Examples of regional assessments for offshore vegetable oil and gas exploitation are known from canadian Atlantic waters ( for example, LGL Ltd., 2003 ), the norwegian Barents Sea ( Hasle et al., 2009 ), the UK offshore area ( e.g., Geotek Ltd. and Hartley Anderson Ltd., 2003 ), and the Gulf of Mexico ( for example, Minerals Management Service, 2003 ). judgment procedures ( for example, in terms of legal mandate, objectives, process, level of detail ) applied by these countries vary, but the assessments typically included the compilation of regional service line data, identification of environmental sensitivities, and determination of where future hydrocarbon exploration could take seat or should be avoided ( Fidler and Noble, 2012 ) .
Effects of Routine Activities
act anoint and boast activities can have damaging environmental effects during each of the independent phases of exploration, production, and decommissioning ( Figure 3 ). During the exploration phase, impacts can result from indirect ( sound and traffic ) and directly physical ( anchor chains, drill cuttings, and drilling fluids ) disturbance. extra direct forcible impacts occur in the production phase as pipelines are laid and the volume of discharge produced water increases. last, decommissioning can result in a series of send impacts on the sea floor and can re-introduce contaminants to the environment. It is critical that all of the potential impacts of routine operations are accounted for when designing management strategies, whether local or regional, for offshore oil and gas activities .
FIGURE 3
Figure 3. Diagram of impacts from typical deep-sea drilling activity .
Impacts from deep-water oil and natural gas development activities begin during seismic surveys that are used to reveal the subsurface geology and locate electric potential reservoirs. These impacts include subaqueous sound and alight emissions and increase vessel activity. sound levels produced during seismic surveys vary in saturation, but in some cases, soundwaves from these surveys have been detected about 4000 km aside from the survey vessel ( Nieukirk et al., 2012 ). impingement assessments of acoustic perturbation have chiefly focused on marine mammals. Reported effects include disruption of demeanor ( for example, eating, education, resting, migration ), masking of sounds used for communication and navigation, localized displacement, physiologic try, adenine well as physical injury including temp or permanent hearing damage ( Gordon et al., 2004 ; Southall et al., 2008 ; Moore et al., 2012 ). Marine mammal photograph experiments and noise generation modeling suggest that hearing wrong may occur within a few 100 thousand to km from the sound source, with avoidance behaviors more variable star but broadly detected over greater distances ( Southall et al., 2008 ). In contrast, the likely effects of sound on pisces and invertebrates remain ailing understood, but may be meaning ( Hawkins et al., 2014 ). For exemplar, significant developmental delays and body malformations have been recorded in scallop larva exposed to seismic pulses ( de Soto et al., 2013 ). vulnerability to subaqueous broadband sound fields that resemble offshore ship and construction bodily process can besides influence the action and demeanor of key bioturbating species in sediments ( Solan et al., 2016 ) .
Operations at oil fields introduce considerable amounts of artificial light ( for example, electric alight, accelerator flares ) that can potentially affect ecological processes in the amphetamine ocean, such as diel vertical migration of plankton ( Moore et al., 2000 ). artificial night alight besides attracts numerous species, including squid, boastfully marauding fishes, and birds ( Longcore and Rich, 2004 ). Underwater lighting, such as used on remotely operate on vehicles, is likely to be of relatively meek impact, though it may be meaning in the case of species with highly medium ocular systems ( Herring et al., 1999 ) .
once the initiation of infrastructure commences, direct impacts on habitats and associated animal increase ( table 2 ). placement of infrastructure on the seafloor, such as anchors and pipelines, will immediately disturb the ocean floor and cause a transient increase in local deposit. typically, 8–12 anchors are used to moor a semi-submersible drill rig. The spatial extent of anchor impacts on the ocean floor varies depending on engage depth, but is typically between 1.5 and 2.5 times the water astuteness of the operation ( Vryhof Anchors BV, 2010 ). As anchors are set, they are dragged along the ocean floor, damaging benthic organisms and leaving an anchor scar on the seafloor. The impact of anchors in the cryptic ocean is of greatest concern in biogenic habitats, such as those formed by corals and sponges, which are fragile and have moo resilience to physical forces ( Hall-Spencer et al., 2002 ; Watling, 2014 ). Anchor operations have been shown to impact coral communities directly through forcible affray and increased local deposit, with an estimated 100 molarity wide corridor of influence ( Ulfsnes et al., 2013 ). The lay of pipelines besides alters local anesthetic seabed habitat conditions by adding hard substrate, which in turn may support sessile epifauna and/or attract motile benthic organisms ( Lebrato and Jones, 2009 ). Ulfsnes et alabama. ( 2013 ) estimated a 50 thousand wide-eyed corridor of impact for grapevine installations, including dislocation of existing hard substrata. corrosion and escape of pipelines besides poses the risk of exposing deep-sea fauna to potentially damaging pollution .
table 2
Table 2. Types of impacts from offshore oil and gas activities .
The drill procedure involves the disposal of waste, including drill cuttings and surfeit cement, fluids ( drilling mud ), produced water system, and early chemicals that may cause damaging ecological effects ( Gray et al., 1990 ). Drill cuttings are the fragments of rock that are created during the drill process. The chemical typography of drill mud is diverse, and has changed from the more toxic oil-based muds ( presently restricted in many jurisdictions ) to more modern synthetic and water-based fluids. The types of fluids most normally used presently are by and large regarded to be less toxic than oil-based fluids, but they are not without adverse biological effects ( Daan and Mulder, 1996 ; Breuer et al., 2004 ; Bakhtyar and Gagnon, 2012 ; Gagnon and Bakhtyar, 2013 ; Edge et al., 2016 ). Produced water is contaminated urine associated with petroleum and gasoline extraction summons, with an estimated global production proportion of 3:1 water : oil over the life of a well ( Khatib and Verbeek, 2002 ; Neff, 2002 ; Fakhru’l-Razi et al., 2009 ). however, it should be noted that this is a global average, and these estimates vary greatly between hydrocarbon fields with the proportion of water to anoint increasing over the life of a single well. Produced urine is primarily composed of constitution water extracted during oil and gas convalescence, but may besides contain seawater that has previously been injected into the reservoir along with dissolve inorganic salts, dissolved and dispersed hydrocarbons, dissolved minerals, decipher metals, naturally occurring radioactive substances, output chemicals, and dissolved gases ( Hansen and Davies, 1994 ; Neff, 2002 ; Fakhru’l-Razi et al., 2009 ; Bakke et al., 2013 ). As a major reservoir of contaminants from petroleum and gas extraction activity, produce water is typically treated in accord with rigorous regulations before being discharged ( for example, OSPAR, 2001 ) .
The spatial footprint of dispatch varies with the bulk of discharge, astuteness of dismissal, local hydrography, particle size distribution, rates of colonization and floccule formation, and fourth dimension since discharge ( Neff, 2005 ; Niu et al., 2009 ). Although volumes are probably to vary greatly depending on the local anesthetic conditions during the active stagecoach of drill, discharges from one deep-water well at 900 m depth off the coast of Brazil were ~270 m3 of cuttings, 320 m3 of water-based fluids, and 70 m3 of non-aqueous fluids ( Pivel et al., 2009 ). These types of discharges may produce cuttings accumulations improving to 20 m in thickness within 100–500 molarity of the well site ( Breuer et al., 2004 ; Jones et al., 2006 ; Pivel et al., 2009 ). ocular judgment at 10 late deep-water well sites between 370 and 1750 thousand astuteness, drilled using current best drill in the NE Atlantic, recorded ocular cuttings accumulations present over a radius of 50–150 megabyte from the well head ( Jones and Gates, 2010 ) .
likely impacts on ocean floor communities can result from both the chemical toxicants and the physical disturbance ( see drumhead in mesa 3, Figure 4 ). reduction in oxygen concentration, constituent enrichment, increased hydrocarbon concentrations, and increased metallic element abundance can alter biogeochemical processes and generate hydrogen sulfide and ammonia water ( Neff, 2002 ). At present, little information is available on the effects of these processes at the microbial flat. At the metazoan level, community-level changes in the concentration, biomass, and diverseness of protist, meio-, macro-, and megafaunal assemblages have been recorded in respective studies ( Gray et al., 1990 ; Currie and Isaacs, 2005 ; Jones et al., 2007 ; Netto et al., 2009 ; Santos et al., 2009 ; Lanzen et al., 2016 ). These changes have been linked with smother by drilling cuttings and increase concentrations of harmful metals ( for example, barium ) and hydrocarbons ( Holdway, 2002 ; Breuer et al., 2004 ; Santos et al., 2009 ; Trannum et al., 2010 ) .
table 3
Table 3. Examples of the detected spatial extent (“sphere of influence”) and likely recovery in the benthos attributed to spatial proximity to offshore oil and gas drilling operations on the seafloor .
FIGURE 4
Figure 4. Illustrative examples of spatial patterns in the benthos associated with exploratory and routine drilling operations (i.e., excluding large accidental spills; see Table 3 for additional information on graphed studies). note that impacts in (A,B) are from oil-based drill mud, and impacts in (F) are from a web site where no drilling lubricant was used, while the rest of the studies (C–E,G–I) were from sites using water-based muds .
Detected ecological changes attributed to current practices have typically been found within 200–300 thousand of the well-head ( Currie and Isaacs, 2005 ; Gates and Jones, 2012 ), but can occasionally extend to 1–2 kilometer for sensitive species ( Paine et al., 2014 ). former boring practices, where oil-based drill muds were used for the entire drill work ( use of such methods are presently heavily regulated in most jurisdictions ), appeared to generate benthic impacts to > 5 kilometer from the discharge point ( Olsgard and Gray, 1995 ). More late evidence based on stream boring techniques suggests that the effects of produce water system on benthic organisms will be limited to 1–2 kilometer from the reference ( Bakke et al., 2013 ). Seafloor coverage of drill cuttings angstrom low as 3 millimeter thickness can generate detectable impacts to the infauna ( Schaaning et al., 2008 ). however, even beyond the area of discernible cuttings piles, quantitative changes in meiofaunal abundance and community composing have been observed ( Montagna and Harper, 1996 ; Netto et al., 2009 ). Changes in assembly structure have besides been observed beyond the areas of visually apparent seafloor disturbance as a leave of increased scavenge and opportunist prey on dead animals ( Jones et al., 2007 ; Hughes et al., 2010 ). Despite occasional observations of increased scavenger abundance in affect areas, it has been suggested that the fauna of cuttings-contaminated sediments represent a reduced food resource for pisces populations ( for example, smaller body size, personnel casualty of epifaunal species, shift from ophiuroids to polychaetes ; Olsgard and Gray, 1995 ) .
Cold-water corals ( Figure 5 ) have been the focus of numerous impact studies. Discharges from distinctive operations have the potential to impact cold-water coral communities in deep waters through smother and toxic effects ( Lepland and Mortensen, 2008 ; Purser and Thomsen, 2012 ; Larsson et al., 2013 ). In testing ground studies, the reef-framework-forming granitic coral Lophelia pertusa had significant polyp mortality following burying by 6.5 mm of drill cuttings, the maximum permissible under environmental risk appraisal in Norway ( Larsson and Purser, 2011 ). As a result, at the Morvin airfield in Norway, where drilling took place near a Lophelia reef, a novel cuttings-transport arrangement was developed to discharge cuttings some 500 m from the well and down-current from the most significant coral reefs ( Purser, 2015 ). The discharge placement was determined to minimize impacts based on cuttings dispersion simulation modeling ( Reed and Hetland, 2002 ). subsequent monitoring at nine reefs between 100 m and 2 kilometer from the acquit site suggested this extenuation measure appeared to have been by and large successful. Although concentrations of drill cuttings > 25 ppm were observed at respective of the monitor reefs, no obvious ocular impacts to the coral communities were reported ( Purser, 2015 ). however, this concentration of drill cuttings had been shown to have a meaning negative effect on L. pertusa increase in lab experiments ( Larsson et al., 2013 ) .
FIGURE 5
Figure 5. Deep-sea communities near drilling activities. (A) Benthic communities concisely after smothering by ( light colored ) cuttings at the Tornado Field ( 1050 megabyte depth ), Faroe-Shetland Channel, UK. (B) Edge of cuttings pile at the Laggan battlefield, Faroe-Shetland Channel, UK ( Figure 4D from Jones et al., 2012a ). (C) Atlantic roughy, Hoplostethus occidentalis, among L. pertusa around the abandoned test-pile near Zinc at 450 m astuteness in the Gulf of Mexico. Image courtesy of the Lophelia II plan, US Bureau of Ocean Energy and Management and NOAA Office of Ocean Exploraiton and Research. (D) appearance in 2013 of a Paramuricea biscaya colony damaged during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. Image courtesy of ECOGIG, a GoMRI-funded research consortium and the Ocean Exploration Trust. (E,F) : Methane-seep communities from an area within the exclusive economic zone of Trinidad and Tobago that is targeted for future vegetable oil and gas growth. The Ocean Exploration Trust is acknowledged for use of these photos from the E/V Nautilus 2014 Expedition .
Impacts from vegetable oil and gas operations may be compounded in some settings by other anthropogenetic disturbances, particularly as human impacts on the deep-sea environment continue to increase ( for example, Glover and Smith, 2003 ; Ramirez-Llodra et al., 2011 ; Kark et al., 2015 ). Climate and ocean change, including higher temperatures, expansion of oxygen minimal zones, and ocean acidification, will exacerbate the more conduct impacts of the vegetable oil and gasoline diligence through increased metabolic requirement. multiple stressors can operate as additive effects, synergistic effects, or antagonistic effects ( Crain et al., 2008 ). While studies of the interactions between climate variables ( temperature, oxygen, ph, CO2 ) and drill impacts are rare or non-existent, multiple stressors typically have antagonistic effects at the community degree, but synergistic effects at the population horizontal surface ( Crain et al., 2008 ). At the most basic horizontal surface, experimental work has shown that increase temperature by and large increases the toxicity of petroleum hydrocarbons and other compounds ( Cairns et al., 1975 ; Tatem et al., 1978 ), which suggests that the ecological impacts that have been recorded to date may expand in magnitude and distance as climate change proceeds .
deep-water fisheries have a significant impact on deep-sea species, with damaging effects extending to habitats and ecosystems beyond the target populations ( Benn et al., 2010 ; Clark et al., 2016 ). Some authors note that the physical presence of oil and gas infrastructure may protect fish species or habitats by de facto creating fisheries ejection zones ( Hall, 2001 ; Love et al., 2006 ), by establishing new reef habitat ( sensu Montagna et al., 2002 ), and by functioning as pisces aggregating devices ( Hinck et al., 2004 ). Although the rate of oil and boast infrastructure in secondary production and fisheries, particularly in deep waters, is controversial ( Bohnsack, 1989 ; Baine, 2002 ; Ponti, 2002 ; Powers et al., 2003 ; Fabi et al., 2004 ; Kaiser and Pulsipher, 2006 ), there is some testify to suggest that this can occur ( Claisse et al., 2015 ). Oil industry infrastructure may therefore have some positivist effects, even in deep water ( Macreadie et al., 2011 ), chiefly in terms of creating refugia from fishing impacts ( for example, Wilson et al., 2002 ) .
Oil-field infrastructure can besides provide hard substrate for colonization by benthic invertebrates, including scleractinian corals and octocorals ( Hall, 2001 ; Sammarco et al., 2004 ; Gass and Roberts, 2006 ; Larcom et al., 2014 ). The widely-distributed coral L. pertusa ( Figure 5 ) has been recorded on numerous oil playing field structures in the northerly North Sea ( Bell and Smith, 1999 ; Gass and Roberts, 2006 ), vitamin a well as on infrastructure in the Faroe-Shetland Channel ( Hughes, 2011 ), and the northerly Gulf of Mexico ( Larcom et al., 2014 ). These man-made structures may enhance population connectivity ( Atchison et al., 2008 ) and provide stepping stones for both native and potentially encroaching species, which has been demonstrated for shallow-water species that may not normally be able to disperse across large expanses of open body of water ( Page et al., 2006 ; Coutts and Dodgshun, 2007 ; Sheehy and Vik, 2010 ). consequently, the increased connectivity provided by these artificial structures may be viewed both positively and negatively, and it is difficult to make predictions about the potential benefits or damage of the increase handiness of deep-sea hard substrata .
Effects of Accidental Discharges
oil and gasoline operations have the likely to result in accidental releases of hydrocarbons, with the likelihood of an accidental spill or blowout increasing with the depth of the operations ( Muehlenbachs et al., 2013 ). The U.S. NOAA Office of Response and Restoration records, on average, 1–3 spills per week within the US EEZ, but most of these are relatively modest and happen near the shore. On the U.S. out continental ledge between 1971 and 2010, there were 23 big spills of more than 1000 barrels ( 160,000 L ) of anoint, or an average of one every 21 months ( Anderson et al., 2012 ). In addition, on a global scale there were 166 spills over 1000 barrels that occurred during offshore transportation of oil in the period between 1974 and 2008, or one every 2.5 months ( Anderson et al., 2012 ). The greatest hazard to the nautical environment comes from an uncontrolled liberation of hydrocarbons from the reservoir, known as a blowout ( Johansen et al., 2003 ). gamble modeling suggests that an event the size of the Deepwater Horizon incidental can be broadly predicted to occur on an interval between 8 and 91 years, or a roughly average of once every 17 years ( Eckle et al., 2012 ). several major offshore oil blowouts have occurred, including the IXTOC-1 well in the Bahia de Campeche, Mexico where 3.5 million barrels of oil were released at a water depth of 50 m over 9 months ( Jernelov and Linden, 1981 ; Sun et al., 2015 ) and the Ekofisk gala where 200,000 barrels ( 32 million liters ) of oil were released at a water depth of 70 thousand ( Law, 1978 ). While all of these examples represent accidental discharges, the frequency at which they occur in offshore waters suggests that they can be expected during “ distinctive ” operations .
The best-studied case of a major deep-sea blowout was at the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 ( Joye et al., 2016 ). This runaway discharged ~5 million barrels ( 800 million liters ) of oil at a water depth of ~1500 m ( McNutt et al., 2012 ). About half of the oil traveled up to the coat, while the respite of the gaseous hydrocarbons and oil suspended as microdroplets remained in a subsurface plume centered around 1100 thousand astuteness, that traveled ~50 kilometer from the well-head ( Camilli et al., 2010 ). The surface oil slicks interacted with planktonic communities and mineral particles to form an emulsion of oil marine snow ( Passow et al., 2012 ). This corporeal was subsequently observed as a deposit layer on the deep-sea shock that was detected in an area of ~3200 km2 ( Chanton et al., 2014 ; Valentine et al., 2014 ). Impacts at the ocean floor, as revealed by elevated railway hydrocarbon concentrations and changes to the nematode-copepod proportion, were detected in an area of over 300 km2, with patchy impacts observed to a radius of 45 kilometer from the well locate ( Montagna et al., 2013 ; Baguley et al., 2015 ). This oiled marine bamboozle was besides implicated in impacts on mesophotic and deep-sea coral communities ( White et al., 2012 ; Silva et al., 2015 ; Figure 5 ) .
deep-sea coral communities were contaminated by a layer of flocculent material that included vegetable oil fingerprinted to the Macondo well, and constituents of the chemical dispersant used in the reaction campaign ( White et al., 2012, 2014 ). Impacts on corals were detected at a number of sites, extending to 22 kilometer from the well, and to water depths ( 1950 thousand ) exceeding that of the well-head ( Hsing et al., 2013 ; Fisher et al., 2014a ). The severity of impact on the coral colonies appeared to be related to distance from the well, with > 50 % of the corals exhibiting > 10 % colony damage nearer to the good, and less-extensive patchy price recorded at the more distant sites ( Fisher et al., 2014a ). Elevated hydrocarbon concentrations and changes to infaunal communities were reported from sediment samples taken adjacent to the impact coral sites ( Fisher et al., 2014b ) .
Dispersants or chemical emulsifiers are applied to vegetable oil spills in an feat to disperse surface slicks. globally, there have been over 200 document instances of dispersant consumption between 1968 and 2007 ( Steen, 2008 ). Dispersant applications typically are successful in dispersing large oil aggregations, although their potency varies with oil composing, mixing dynamics, temperature, salt, and the presence of light ( Weaver, 2004 ; Henry, 2005 ; NRC, 2005 ; Chandrasekar et al., 2006 ; Kuhl et al., 2013 ). however, the practice of dispersants creates two extra impacts : ( iodine ) a toxic effects from the dispersant itself, and ( two ) a broader and/or more rapid contaminant of the environment as a consequence of the dispersion of hydrocarbons .
Dispersant use can cause increases in environmental hydrocarbon concentrations ( Pace et al., 1995 ) and direct toxic effects ( Epstein et al., 2000 ). Dispersants increase the surface area for oil-water interactions ( Pace et al., 1995 ), apparently increasing the biological handiness of anoint compounds ( Couillard et al., 2005 ; Schein et al., 2009 ), potentially enhancing toxic effects ( Chandrasekar et al., 2006 ; Goodbody-Gringley et al., 2013 ; DeLeo et al., 2016 ). however, in the font of the Deepwater Horizon accident, dispersant use was shown to impede hydrocarbon abasement by microorganisms ( Kleindienst et al., 2015 ). Chemically-dispersed vegetable oil is known to reduce larval village, cause abnormal exploitation, and produce tissue degeneracy in sessile invertebrates ( Epstein et al., 2000 ; Goodbody-Gringley et al., 2013 ; DeLeo et al., 2016 ). Dispersant vulnerability alone has proved toxic to shallow-water coral larva ( Goodbody-Gringley et al., 2013 ) and deep-sea octocorals ( DeLeo et al., 2016 ). Some of the potentially toxic components of dispersants may persist in the marine environment for years ( White et al., 2014 ), but there are few in situ or even ex situ studies of effects of dispersants on deep-sea organisms .
Recovery from Impacts
typical impacts from drill may persist over long fourth dimension scales ( years to decades ) in the deep sea ( board 3 ). In deep waters, the by and large low-energy hydrodynamic government may lead to long-run continuity of empty material, whether it be intentional or accidental ( Neff, 2002 ; Chanton et al., 2014 ). sediment contamination by hydrocarbons, peculiarly PAHs, is of particular concern, as these compounds can persist for decades, posing significant risk of drawn-out ecotoxicological effects. Hydrocarbons from the Prestige spill, off the Galician slide, were even present in intertidal sediments 10 years post-spill ( Bernabeu et al., 2013 ), and petroleum residues from the oil barge Florida were however detectable in salt marsh sediments in West Falmouth, MA, after 30 years ( Reddy et al., 2002 ). In the norwegian Sea ( 380 molarity depth ), there was a reduction in the visible footprint of drill cuttings from a radius of over 50 m to ~20 megabyte over 3 years, but chemical contaminant persisted over the larger area ( Gates and Jones, 2012 ). In the Faroe-Shetland Channel ( 500–600 meter ), visible drill cuttings reduced from a radius of over 85–35 m over a 3-year period, while an adjacent 10 year-old well-site exhibited visually clear-cut cuttings piles at a radius of entirely 15–20 m ( Jones et al., 2012a ). recovery of benthic habitats may take longer at sites where bottom water movements limit dispersion of cuttings ( Breuer et al., 2004 ) .
a lot of the deep-sea floor is characterized by relatively low temperatures and low food provision rates. consequently, deep-sea communities and individuals generally exhibit a slower pace of life than their shallow-water counterparts ( reviewed in Gage and Tyler, 1991 ; McClain and Schlacher, 2015 ). deep-water corals and cold-seep communities ( Figure 5 ) represent anomalous high-biomass ecosystems in the deep sea and frequently occur in areas of economic matter to because of their direct ( energy and carbon informant ) or indirect ( substrate in the shape of authigenic carbonate ) association with petroleum and/or gas-rich fluids ( Masson et al., 2003 ; Coleman et al., 2005 ; Schroeder et al., 2005 ; Cordes et al., 2008 ; Bernardino et al., 2012 ; Jones et al., 2014 ). Cold-seep tubeworms and deep-water corals exhibit slow growth and some of the greatest longevities among marine metazoans, typically decades to hundreds of years, but occasionally to thousands of years ( Fisher et al., 1997 ; Bergquist et al., 2000 ; Andrews et al., 2002 ; Roark et al., 2006 ; Cordes et al., 2007 ; Watling et al., 2011 ). recruitment and colonization dynamics are not well-understood for these assemblages, but recruitment appears to be decelerate and episodic in cold-seep tubeworms ( Cordes et al., 2003 ), mussels ( Arellano and Young, 2009 ), and deep-sea corals ( Thresher et al., 2011 ; Lacharité and Metaxas, 2013 ; Doughty et al., 2014 ) .
Because of the combination of slow growth, long life spans and variable recruitment, recovery from impacts can be prolonged. Based on make bold dull recolonization rates of uncontaminated deep-sea sediments ( Grassle, 1977 ), low environmental temperatures, and consequently reduced metabolic rates ( Baguley et al., 2008 ; Rowe and Kennicutt, 2008 ), Montagna et aluminum. ( 2013 ) suggested recovery of the soft-sediment benthos from the Deepwater Horizon well blowout might take decades. For deep-sea corals, recovery prison term estimates are on the orderliness of centuries to millennia ( Fisher et al., 2014b ). however, in some cases re-colonization may be relatively rapid, for exemplar, meaning macrofaunal recruitment on cuttings piles after 6 months ( Trannum et al., 2011 ; Table 3 ). Altered benthic species composition may, however, persist for years to decades ( Netto et al., 2009 ). direct studies of recovery from drilling in deep water are lacking and the accumulative effects of multiple drill wells are not well-studied .
Environmental Management Approaches
environmental management takes many forms. We focus on management activities that mitigate the adverse environmental effects of petroleum and gas development, specifically addressing avoidance- and minimization-type approaches ( World Bank, 2012 ). here, we consider three complemental strategies : ( i ) activity management, ( two ) temporal role management, and ( three ) spatial management ( board 1 ) .
Activity Management
In natural process management, certain practices ( or discharges ) are restricted or banned, or certain technologies are employed to reduce the environmental impingement of operations. An case of activeness management is the phasing out of drill muds that used diesel oil as their foundation. These drilling fluids biodegrade very lento, have a high toxicity, and exposure to them can result in negative environmental consequences ( Davies et al., 1989 ). In addition, many countries have introduced restrictions on the fire of lower-toxicity organic-phase drill mud ( i, oil-based mud containing mineral anoint or man-made liquids ) and untreated cuttings contaminated with these fluids. For example, the OSPAR Convention prohibits Contracting Parties from discharging wholly organic-phase fluids and cuttings containing organic-phase muds of more than 1 % by weight on dry cuttings ( OSPAR Commission, 2000 ), and permits are typically required for the function, reinjection and discharge of chemicals including drill mire and cuttings containing hydrocarbons from the reservoir. The elimination of these discharges has led to demonstrably repress extents of drilling impacts ( Figure 4 ), from thousands of meters around wells drilled using oil-based muds ( Davies et al., 1984 ; Mair et al., 1987 ; Gray et al., 1990 ; Kröncke et al., 1992 ) to hundreds of meters for wells drilled using water-based muds ( Jones et al., 2006 ; Gates and Jones, 2012 ). Restrictions are besides imposed on the discharge of produce water, with produce water typically being expected to be re-injected into subsurface formations, or to be cleaned to meet home oil-in-produced water fire limits before being disposed into the sea ( Ahmadun et al., 2009 ) .
During exploration activities, natural process management may be required for seismic surveys, because the intense acoustic energy can cause ecological impacts peculiarly to marine mammals. In many countries, including the US, UK, Brazil, Canada, and Australia, extenuation protocols have been developed to reduce the risk of adverse impacts on marine mammals ( Compton et al., 2008 ). These include “ soft-start ” or “ ramp-up ” rules that require tune grease-gun world power to be slowly increased to allow marine mammals to vacate the area before the full office is reached, and the need for train Marine Mammal Observers to monitor an ejection partition around the sound reference and to delay or stop operations should any marine mammals be observed within a predefined base hit zone ( Compton et al., 2008 ) .
Activity management may besides be applied to oil and gas industry decommissioning. In european waters, for example, OSPAR has prohibited the dumping or leaving in place of disused infrastructure ( OSPAR Decision 98/3, 1998 ). Although some large installations are exempt, most structures must be taken onshore for disposal ; however the environmental impacts caused by removing these boastfully structures may outweigh any negative effects of leaving them in put. In many other jurisdictions, such as the US, Malaysia, Japan, and Brunei, decommissioned structures may be left in place as artificial reef ( Fjellsa, 1995 ; Kaiser and Pulsipher, 2005 ). Since 1986, the US Department of the Interior has approved over 400 “ Rigs-to-Reefs ” proposals ( Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement ). To date, these rig-to-reef proposals are limited to shallow waters, where they are thought to create habitat for commercial and recreational fisheries species .
Temporal Management
temporal role management of oil and gasoline activities is not yet widely applied in deep-water settings. temporal management approaches are intended to reduce impacts on the breeding, feeding, or migration of pisces, marine mammals, and seabirds. furthermore, seismic operations along marine mammal migration routes or within known feeding or breeding grounds may be restricted during collection or migration periods in order to reduce the probability of marine mammals being present in the area during the surveil ( Compton et al., 2008 ). In addition, soft-start procedures may only be allowed to commence during daylight hours and periods of good visibility to ensure observers can monitor the area around the air grease-gun array and delay or stop seismic operations if necessary ( Compton et al., 2008 ). In Norway, seismic surveys can not commence if marine mammals or turtles are salute in the immediate area and monitoring is carried out by coach observers, whose bearing is required on all deep-water ( > 200 megabyte depth ) seismic surveys .
temporal management has besides been proposed for the cold-water coral L. pertusa in Norway ( Norsk Olje og Gass, 2013 ). In the NE Atlantic, this species appears to spawn chiefly between January and March ( Brooke and Jarnegren, 2013 ) and the larva are thought to be highly sensitive to elevated freeze sediment loads, including drill cuttings ( Larsson et al., 2013 ; Jarnegren et al., 2016 ). Recommendations are to delay bore activities near Lophelia reef during main spawning periods of the corals or early ecologically and/or economically important species. particular steps to strengthen the oil spill emergency reply system, including shorter reaction times during the engender temper have besides been implemented .
Spatial Management
spatial management prohibits particular activities from certain areas, for exemplar where sensitive species or habitats are present. This can range from implementing exclusion zones around sensitive areas potentially affected by individual vegetable oil and accelerator operations to establishing courtly marine protected areas through legislative processes where homo activities deemed to cause environmental injury are prohibited. The habit of EIAs as a tool for identifying local spatial restrictions for deep-water vegetable oil and flatulence operations is widely applied, and specific no-drilling zones ( moderation areas ) are defined by the regulative authority around sensitive areas known or occurring with high-probability ( mesa 1 ). The necessitate for spatial restrictions to hydrocarbon exploitation may besides be identified at the strategic plan stage. In Norway, for case, regional multi-sector assessments have been undertaken to examine the environmental and socio-economic impacts of respective offshore sectors and to develop a arrange of integrate management plans for Norway ‘s nautical areas. The plans incorporate information on potential accumulative effects from multiple sectors, electric potential drug user conflicts and samara cognition gaps, deoxyadenosine monophosphate well as locations that should be exempt from future hydrocarbon exploration owing to their ecological measure and sensitivity to potential effects from offshore drill ( Fidler and Noble, 2012 ; Olsen et al., 2016 ) .
A number of approaches have been used to identify the ecological features and attributes used in setting targets for spatial management, some of which may be relevant in the deep-sea environment. For exercise, the terminus “ vulnerable marine ecosystem ” ( VME ) is normally used in fisheries management and is defined as an ecosystem that is easily damaged as a resultant role of its physical and/or functional fragility ( for example, Ardron et al., 2014 ). The VME concept was conceived under the auspices of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation ( FAO, 2009 ) to assist in the appraisal and control of the impacts of demersal fisheries in areas beyond national jurisdiction ( the “ Area ” or the ‘ High Seas ’ ). Cold-seep and deep-water coral ecosystems ( Figure 5 ) would be considered as VMEs under this framework. however, given that the deep-water petroleum and gas industry still operates, about entirely, within areas of national legal power, and has impacts that differ in extent and character to bottom-contact fish, the VME concept may not be the most allow .
A potentially more relevant model for determining deep-water habitats to be protected is that of the “ ecologically or biologically meaning area ” ( EBSA ) developed under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity ( CBD ; see e.g., Dunn et al., 2014 ; note that the US is not a signer to the CBD ). EBSAs are thought of as “ discrete areas, which through scientific criteria, have been identified as significant for the health and operation of our oceans and the services that they provide ” ( UNEP-WCMC, 2014 ). such criteria include : singularity or curio ; particular importance for life-history stages of species ; importance for threatened, endangered or declining species and/or habitats ; vulnerability, fragility, sensitivity, or slow recovery ; biological productiveness ; biological diverseness ; and naturalness. These criteria synthesize well-established regional and international guidelines for spatial planning ( Dunn et al., 2014 ), and consequently should be highly relevant for future spatial planning in the petroleum and gas industry ( Clark et al., 2014 ). regional cooperation is encouraged in the spatial management of EBSAs, including identify and adopting appropriate conservation measures and sustainable use, and establishing example networks of marine protected areas ( Dunn et al., 2014 ) .
deep-sea habitats that would be considered as VMEs and would besides fit many of the EBSA criteria include cold-seep and deep-water coral communities. Both habitats are of particular significance for the management of deep-water oil and gas activities because they frequently occur in areas of oil and boast interest ( Figure 5 ). These habitats attract conservation care because they are localized ( sensu Bergquist et al., 2003 ), structurally complex ( Bergquist et al., 2003 ; Cordes et al., 2008 ), and contain high primary ( seeps ) and secondary ( corals ) productiveness, relatively gamey biomass, and large-sized organisms ( Sibuet and Olu, 1998 ; Bergquist et al., 2003 ; Cordes et al., 2003 ). The foundation species in these communities are very durable, even compared to other deep-sea fauna ( McClain et al., 2012 ), and support a divers community including some endemic species ( Cordes et al., 2009 ; Quattrini et al., 2012 ). The infaunal and mobile fauna that live on the periphery of these sites are besides distinct from the animal in the background deep sea, both in terms of diverseness and abundance ( Demopoulos et al., 2010 ), and besides deserve consideration for auspices ( Levin et al., 2016 ) .
There are many other deep-sea habitats that would besides fit the EBSA criteria. These are typically biogenic habitats, where one or several key species ( ecosystem engineers ) create habitat for other species. Examples of these include sponges ( Klitgaard and Tendal, 2004 ), xenophyophores ( Levin, 1991 ), tube-forming protists ( De Leo et al., 2010 ), and lodge feeders that create complex burrow networks ( Levin et al., 1997 ). Furthermore, areas of seawater seepage, particularly seawater basins, may not contain abundant arduous substrata, but calm support clear-cut and diverse microbial communities, adenine well as megafaunal communities ( for example, glass sponge gardens in the Orca Basin, Shokes et al., 1977 ) .
For spatial management of these medium areas to be effective, information on the spatial distribution of features of conservation interest is substantive. Mapping these features can be particularly challenging in the deep ocean, but advances in technology are improving our ability to identify and locate them ( for example, multibeam swath bathymetry, sidescan sonar, seismic survey ). even modest occurrences of deep-water corals can be mapped by both moo and high frequency sidescan sonar in settings with relatively low backdrop topography ( for example, Masson et al., 2003 ). Hexactinellid aggregations ( sponge beds ) with across-the-board spicule mats ( see for example, Bett and Rice, 1992 ) may besides have sufficient acoustic key signature to be detectable. In some cases, seep environments can besides be detected via water-column bubble plumes or surface ocean slicks ( Ziervogel et al., 2014 ; MacDonald et al., 2015 ) .
In the absence of direct ocean floor map, habitat suitability models have been used in attempts to predict the happening of species/habitats of interest. These frequently involve the combination of luff observations and oceanographic/environmental data in a geographic context ( Bryan and Metaxas, 2007 ; Tittensor et al., 2009 ; Howell et al., 2011 ; georgian et al., 2014 ). relevant oceanographic and environmental datasets can be obtained from local field measurements, global satellite measurements, and compilations from global ocean datasets ( georgian et al., 2014 ; Guinotte and Davies, 2014 ; Rengstorf et al., 2014 ; Vierod et al., 2014 ). Point source biological observations are good determined from directly seabed sampling and ocular notice ( georgian et al., 2014 ; Rengstorf et al., 2014 ). Additional datum can be derived from historical data ( for example, museums and biogeographic databases such as OBIS and GBIF ) or by-catch from trawl fisheries ( Ardron et al., 2014 ). however, these data must be interpreted with caution as they may include dead and possibly displaced organisms ( i.e., coral skeletons ), and the location information can be imprecise if it is based on the mid-points of trawl locations or from older records before twenty-first century improvements in global and seafloor positioning systems technology .
In most cases, implementation of spatial restrictions depends on positive confirmation of the feature/species/habitats of interest. This is much best achieved via ocular image surveys ( towed television camera, autonomous subaqueous vehicles, ROVs, manned submersible ), which are typically non-destructive and provide valuable data on both biological and environmental characteristics ( georgian et al., 2014 ; Morris et al., 2014 ; Rengstorf et al., 2014 ; Williams et al., 2015 ). collection of reference point physical specimens is besides highly desirable in providing accurate taxonomic identifications of key taxonomic group ( Bullimore et al., 2013 ; Henry and Roberts, 2014 ; Howell et al., 2014 ), and may provide extra relevant data ( for example, life cycles, generative strategies, population connectivity ). together, mapping through outside detection, habitat suitability models, and ground-truthing by seafloor observations and collections provide adequate maps of ecological features to better inform the trade-offs between conservation and economic interests in advance of exploration or extraction activities ( Mariano and La Rovere, 2007 ) .
Areas requiring spatial management may be formally designated as MPAs through executive declarations and legislative processes, or established as a by-product of mandate avoidance rules ( table 1 ). In the UK, these come in the form of Designations as Special Areas of Conservation, Nature Conservation Marine Protected Areas, or Marine Conservation Zones. In the US, these are in the shape of National Monuments ( Presidential executive ordering ), National Marine Sanctuaries ( congressional appointment ), fisheries management areas such as Habitat Areas of Particular Concern, or, in the case of the anoint and gas diligence, through Notices to Lessees issued by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management ( BOEM ). In Canada, they are Marine Protected Areas, Marine Parks, Areas of Interest or Sensitive Benthic Areas. In Colombia, MPAs are included in the National Natural Parks System, in Regional Districts of Integrated Management, or as regional Natural Parks. In many jurisdictions, systems of MPAs are still under exploitation, and vegetable oil and flatulence exploration and growth is permitted within these areas. It remains uncommon for reverse distances or buffer zone requirements to be specified .
The formal designation process for MPAs varies greatly among EEZs. Fundamentally, a firm, widespread systematic conservation plan ( sensu Margules and Pressey, 2000 ) in the deep sea will be critical in creating MPAs that are representative and effective ( Kark et al., 2015 ). MPAs can be big “ no-go ” areas that comprise a wide typeset of spokesperson habitat types. They can besides be networks of smaller areas that may serve as pace stones across the seascape. There have been numerous reviews of the theory behind these assorted designs ( for example, Hyrenbach et al., 2000 ; Botsford et al., 2003 ; Klein et al., 2008 ), and future work including scientists, managers, diligence representatives, and other stakeholders, will be needed to arrive at the most effective scenarios that can be used both as general recommendations and on a individual footing .
even when the dinner dress MPA appointment process is followed, anoint and gas industrial bodily process may silent be permissible, although their proximity typically triggers extra scrutiny of growth plans ( Table 1 ). Examples of wells that have been drilled near some authoritative marine protected areas include the Palta-1 well off the Ningaloo witwatersrand in Australia and boring and output in the Flower Gardens National Marine Sanctuary in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico. There are besides examples of marine protected areas that have been designated in regions already supporting active vegetable oil production and / or exploration ( for example, Quad 204 development in the Faroe-Shetland Channel Sponge Belt, Nature Conservation MPA ) .
In some cases, MPAs may not be formally declared, but sensitive habitats are explicitly avoided during field operations as function of the lease conditions. For example, in Norway, exploration drill has occurred near the Pockmark-reefs in the Kristin oil discipline and the reef of the Morvin petroleum field ( Ofstad et al., 2000 ). direct physical damage was limited by ensuring the well localization and anchoring points ( including chains ) were not near the know coral locations. similarly, in Brazil, impacts to deep-water corals must be avoided, and ROV surveys of proposed tracklines for anchors are typically conducted before or after initiation .
Despite the requirements of many jurisdictions to avoid deep-water petroleum activities near sensitive habitats, it remains rare for legally mandated reverse distances or buffer zone requirements to be specified. For case, there are no mandate separation distances of diligence infrastructure and deep-water corals for both the brazilian and norwegian case studies, quite the indigence for spatial restrictions is evaluated on a individual footing as part of the environmental impact assessment action .
Some exceptions exist, such as activities within the US EEZ, where restriction zones for vegetable oil and flatulence industry activities that could damage “ high-density ” deep-water benthic communities have been established. BOEM has taken a precautionary approach and defined extenuation areas in which petroleum and accelerator action is prohibited. These areas are determined from interpretation of seismic review data. former studies have demonstrated that these seismic data can reliably predict the bearing of chemosynthetic and deep-water coral communities ( Roberts et al., 2000, 2010 ), and can explain over 40 % of the unevenness in L. pertusa distribution in the northern Gulf of Mexico ( georgian et al., 2014 ) .
Regulations are issued in the shape of a Notice to Lessees ( NTL ) issued by the US BOEM. The NTL for high-density deep-water ( > 300 meter water depth ) benthic communities ( NTL 2009-G40 ) stipulates that operators have to submit maps depicting bathymetry, seafloor and shallow geological features, and potential biological areas that could be disturbed by the propose activities, including those located outside of the operator ‘s lease. ROV surveys of the tracklines of anchors are typically conducted, but can occur after the facility of the infrastructure if the plan is approved. however, if the well is drilled near a sleep together high-density community or archaeological web site, then ocular surveys are mandate prior to installation. If the ROV surveys reveal high-density chemosynthetic or coral communities, the operator is required to report their occurrence and relegate copies of the images to BOEM for inspection. avoidance measures have to be undertaken for all potential and known high-density benthic communities identified during these assessments .
Beyond the borders of the BOEM extenuation areas, there are mandated set-back distances for oil and gasoline infrastructure in US territorial waters. These distances are chiefly based on a contracted study of impacts from deep-water structures ( CSA, 2006 ). The set-back distance for sea-surface discharges of drilling muds and cuttings was in the first place 305 thousand, corresponding to the average distance over which impacts were detected in the CSA ( 2006 ) study. Following more recent discoveries of abundant deep-water coral communities in and near the hard-ground sites within the moderation areas, the set-back distance was doubled to 610 megabyte ( 2000 feet ). The set-back outdistance for the placement of anchors and other seafloor infrastructure is 150 thousand ( 500 feet ) from the extenuation areas, but this may be reduced to 75 megabyte ( 250 feet ) if a release is requested .
In accession to specific targets for avoidance or establishment of protected areas, the consumption of reference areas can besides assist in spatial management, and in the screen of EIA predictions more broadly. For exemplar, norwegian protocols require the administration and monitor of regional reference book sites, representative of “ normal ” benthic conditions. Comparison of address sites with those proximal to diligence operations allows the effects of drill and act operations to be assessed, properly attribute any changes in the ecological communities, and far inform spatial management rehearse ( Iversen et al., 2011 ). Some real-time monitor and responsive carry through has besides been undertaken in the benthic environment. In Norway, Statoil has monitored the electric potential impacts on a coral reef arrangement at the Morvin oil plain, which included sediment sampling, video recording observations, sensors and sediment traps ( Tenningen et al., 2010 ; Godø et al., 2014 ). The detector data were available in real fourth dimension and enabled drillers to observe if selected reef sites were being impacted by drilling activities. Regardless of the structure of the monitor course of study, some periodic post-development assessments, both within the development area and in allow reference point areas, are required to evaluate the efficacy of the enforced protections .
Conclusions and Recommendations
Deep-sea species, assemblages, and ecosystems have a set up of biological and ecological attributes ( for example, life-history traits, spatial distribution, dispersion, and recruitment ) that by and large confer moo resilience and convalescence electric potential from anthropogenetic disturbances, including those associated with the deep-water oil and flatulence diligence. In general, deep-sea organisms are slower growing and more long lived than their shallow-water counterparts and their distributions, abundance, and species identity remain largely unknown at most locations. The combination of their sensitivity to mental disorder and the direct threat posed by industrial activeness ( of any kind ) should stipulate a precautionary approach to the management of deep-sea resources .
A comprehensive management plan requires accurate environmental maps of deep-sea petroleum and boast production areas. These maps could be more efficaciously generated by creating a cardinal archive of industry-generated acoustic distant sensing data, including seismic data and bathymetry, and making these data available to managers and scientists via open-access platforms. predictive habitat model can besides contribute to the exploitation of distribution maps for specific taxonomic group. In accession, maps need ground-truthing : broad-scale baseline environmental data ( biological/physical/chemical ) that are acquired over a large area are required to place all EIAs in context, with continue monitoring necessary to test their predictions and account for changing baselines. Baseline surveys should be carried out foremost at a regional horizontal surface if no historical data are available. Prior to industrial bodily process, comprehensive examination surveys should be carried out within the planning area ( including along pipeline tracks ) and in a comparable reference area outside of the influence of distinctive impacts ( at least 4–5 kilometer ). Ideally, surveys should include high-resolution mapping, seafloor imagination surveys, and physical samples to characterize the faunal community and ensure proper species identifications, which should consist of a combination of classical and molecular taxonomy. We besides recommend the inclusion of newer high-throughput sequence and metabarcoding techniques for a robust judgment of biodiversity at all size classes ( Pawlowski et al., 2014 ; Lanzen et al., 2016 ). International collaboration with the anoint and gas diligence to develop and conduct basic scientific research should be farther strengthened to obtain the service line information required for a full-bodied understand of the ecology of these systems and the interpretation of monitor results, both at local and regional scales .
We recommend that representatives of all habitat types, ideally based on a strategic regional assessment, should be granted protection. Any high-density, high-biomass, high-relief, or specialized ( i.e., chemosynthetic ) deep-sea habitat should be identified and mapped and avoidance rules or ball MPA designations implemented to minimize adverse impacts. The definition of these significant communities will vary from region to region and will depend on national or international regulations within the region of interest, but the EBSA concept should be generally applicable. Given the likely proximity of medium habitats to anoint and boast activities, and the potential for extremely dull ( centuries to millennia ) convalescence from perturbation in cryptic waters, an integrated approach to conservation is warranted. This will include spatial management in conjunction with activity management in the phase of restrictions on exhaust and the use of water-based drill fluids, and temporal management in areas where industry activity is near breeding aggregations or seasonally spawning sessile organisms .
Most countries have an in-principle commitment to conservation that typically extends to deep-water ecological features. however, it is rare that mandatary set-back distances from sensible features or extensions of spatial protections are included to ensure that industrial action does not impact the habitats designated for protection. This is significant because these habitats, in particular deep-sea coral and cold-seep ecosystems, consist of central, high-biomass sites surrounded by transition zones that can extend at least 100 megabyte from the visually apparent edge of the locate to the background deep-sea community ( Demopoulos et al., 2014 ; Levin et al., 2016 ). Considering the implicit in sources of doubt associated with the management of deep-sea habitats, from the imprecise placement of seafloor infrastructure, to the unevenness in exhaust impact distances, to the uncertainty in seafloor navigation and the locations of the sensitive deep-sea habitats and species, we strongly recommend that buffer zone zones be incorporated into spatial management plans .
Based on what is known on distances over which impacts have been observed, we can propose a fructify of recommendations for allow buffer zones or MPA extensions from sensitive habitats ( table 4 ). Following the Deepwater Horizon spill, impacts to the deep-sea benthos were greatest within a 3 kilometer radius with a sign detected within a 45 kilometer spoke ( Montagna et al., 2013 ), and impacts to deep-sea coral communities were observed within a 25 kilometer radius of the location of the Deepwater Horizon drill swindle ( Fisher et al., 2014a ). While distances derived from the spatial footprints of large spills might offer a solid precautionary approach in regions undergoing development for the first time, they may prove impractical in most settings. For case, a 25 kilometer buffer zone around each of the BOEM extenuation areas in the Gulf of Mexico would exclude drilling from ~98 % of the actively leased blocks of the northern Gulf of Mexico. Therefore, in regions of active rent, the focus should be on the protection of appropriately bombastic, representative areas, while still allowing for industrial natural process in the area .
table 4
Table 4. Recommendations for the spatial management of deep-sea ecosystems in the vicinity of oil and gas industrial activity .
The size of the buffer zones around habitats should be based on the available information on the typical distances over which impacts of standard oil and flatulence industry operations have been documented. Produced water travels 1–2 km on average, elevated railway concentrations of barium ( a common component of drilling mud ) are frequently detected for at least 1 kilometer from the beginning, and cuttings and early come on discard materials, along with changes to the benthic community are much observed on the seafloor at distances of up to 200–300 m. Considering that impacts can extend to 2 km, we recommend that surface infrastructure and any discharge sites should be at least 2 km away from known EBSAs. A more button-down approach, based on the unevenness in urine column current structure and intensity, would be to set the distance as a function of the water depth of operations, with the 2 kilometer extent of typical impacts observed as the minimum distance. Seafloor disturbances from direct physical impacts of anchor, anchor chain, and wire put happen within a 100 thousand spoke of activities. In addition, the infaunal community is importantly unlike between the distinctive deep-sea benthos and areas within ~100 megabyte of deep-water coral reef structures ( Demopoulos et al., 2014 ) or cold seeps ( Levin et al., 2016 ). Therefore, based on the combination of the typical affect distance and the transition zone to the backdrop deep-sea community, we recommend that any seafloor infrastructure without planned discharges should be placed at least 200 meter from the location of these communities. worldly management should besides be considered, particularly during discrete coral spawning events ( Roberts et al., 2009 ) .
Although these recommendations are based on a thorough review of available literature and the authors ‘ extensive experience in several EEZs, the information on likely impingement zones is placid relatively sparse. As a result, processes should be implemented that allow adaptive management to be implemented as more data become available. management plans must clearly communicate quantitative conservation targets that are measurable, the dress of environmental and ecological features to be protected, the levels of satisfactory change, and any curative actions required, increasing the capacity of the industry to better cost and enforce conformity measures as separate of their license to operate. It is besides in the best interests of scientists, managers, and industry alike to arrive at a common, global standard for deep-water environmental protection across EEZs, and it is our hope that this follow-up represents a first step in this focus toward the integrated and comprehensive conservation of vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems .
Author Contributions
EC and DJ wrote, edited and revised the text, created and edited figures and tables. TS contributed analysis and figures and edited and revised the manuscript. All authors contributed to the tables, wrote portions of the textbook, and edited the manuscript .
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that the inquiry was conducted in the absence of any commercial or fiscal relationships that could be construed as a likely conflict of matter to .
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the leadership of the Deep Ocean Stewardship Initiative ( DOSI ), including Lisa Levin, Maria Baker, and Kristina Gjerde, for their support in developing this inspection. This work evolved from a meet of the DOSI Oil and Gas working group supported by the J.M. Kaplan Fund, and associated with the Deep-Sea Biology Symposium in Aveiro, Portugal in September 2015. The members of the Oil and Gas working group that contributed to our discussions at that meet or through the listserve are acknowledged for their contributions to this work. We would besides like to thank the three reviewers and the editor who provided valuable comments and penetration into the work presented here. DJ and AD were supported by funding from the European Union ‘s Horizon 2020 research and invention program under the MERCES ( Marine Ecosystem Restoration in Changing European Seas ) project, grant agreement no 689518. AB was supported by CNPq grants 301412/2013-8 and 200504/2015-0. LH acknowledges fund provided by a Natural Environment Research Council allow ( NE/L008181/1 ). This end product reflects only the authors ‘ views and the funders can not be held responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein .
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