Past, Present and Future Marine Geohazard Issues: Developing Processes To Address Developing Industry Concerns
Authors: Turnbull Jonathan B , Rogers Liz , Walls Anne Helen , Romo Louis A , Hill Andrew William 
Published: May 2013

The marine geohazards industry has developed over the past sixty years in direct response to the needs of the offshore drilling and facilities industry whose operational integrity it seeks to protect.

Developments in marine geohazards industry techniques have, for the main part, reacted to the appearance of newly realised integrity concerns, as realised through industry incidents and findings of subsequent follow up investigations, or through prescient consideration that existing tools and techniques are not adequate for application in new environments - such as the continuing move into ever deeper water or arctic environments, if operational integrity is to be protected.

This paper considers some of the key steps and triggers that have occurred in the past development of geophysical and geological site investigation rationale in both the Gulf of Mexico and North West Europe from which most of the technical progressions have been sourced to the current day.

Recently two areas have emerged for renewed focus and therefore re-evaluation of industry approach: the needs of Relief Wells and Deep Seafloor Benthic assessment. In both cases, however, there are already key previous industry learnings, from over the past twenty years, upon which the industry can build to improve operational and environmental integrity and to be in a position to effectively support either emergency response or fundamental understanding as it is required.

The paper uses industry: statistics, past major incidents, published references and data to illustrate the themes and to assist in identifying areas for future Marine Geohazard technology focus and development.

Introduction

It is generally accepted that the offshore industry, as would be described today, dates from when Kerr McGee spudded the historic Ship Shoal Block 32 well in October 1947. Since this time the industry has developed to the point where the world record depth of drilling and development is Petrobras's America's Cascade FPSO in the Walker Ridge 249 field in 2,600 meters of water in the Gulf of Mexico. The offshore industry is now near global in its activities and reach.

Throughout this time, however, the industry's development has been punctuated by significant safety incidents that, in turn, have triggered developments of technology or technique to counter the re-occurrence of the underlying cause of the incident - either due to previous techniques having been realized to be inadequate in the setting they were being applied, or due to entirely new, previously unknown, issues arising that now require evaluation and understanding to mitigate risk and prevent recurrence in future activities.

Until the late 1980s the industry mainly acted in a responsive manner to issues arising. New tools and techniques were generally developed and applied to provide support in defining a newly realized hazard area to allow either direct avoidance or mitigation of the hazard through engineering - either in well or facilities design. This is very well illustrated by the issue of shallow gas.