Offshore staff
STUART, FL — CSA Ocean Sciences has completed a post-drill monitoring survey (PDMS) offshore Trinidad.
The unnamed oil and gas operator that commissioned the survey drilled the well during May to August 2022, with CSA completing the PDMS last November in compliance with local regulatory requirements.
According to the company, the purpose of PDMS campaigns in waters around completed wells is to evaluate potential temporal and/or spatial impacts to the marine environment caused by drilling discharges and to predict potential recovery times where these occur.
Following validation of the data, the results serve to improve predictive modeling and assist environmental and social impact assessments and environmental impact assessment reports.
For this campaign, CSA deployed a team from its Trinidad and Tobago office, with the vessel and equipment mobilized from the company’s location in the capital, Port-of-Spain.
The program involved factoring in the predominant direction of previously modeled drilling discharges, with sediment samples retrieved from within a 1.5-km radius of the wellsite using a Smith McIntyre grab sampler in water depths of about 15 m.
Samples were processed, stored and handled in accordance with international standards and local laboratory guidance and then sent to laboratories for further assessment of sediment quality for hydrocarbons and macrofauna.
Sediment chemistry parameters studied included grain size and hydrocarbons, with findings compared with data available from a previous baseline environmental survey conducted by CSA in the same offshore block on the southwest coast in 2021.
A geophysical survey using a side-scan sonar to collect seabed imagery helped to verify the modeled discharge and dispersion patterns of drill cuttings and muds. CSA’s geospatial and survey teams completed the processing, interpretation and visualization of the data.
06.28.2023
