Biodiversity and habitat protection are key items in the offshore activities and their relevance increased in the last decades. The O&G Companies made relevant efforts to operate in compliance with the needs of biodiversity conservation. Nevertheless, public opinion and several NGOs continue to oppose the offshore O&G activities. We provide an outline of the most important recent plans, international conventions and guidelines on the conservation of Mediterranean marine biodiversity. We also illustrate their implications in offshore operations (e.g. the seismic surveys and the pipeline laying).
We then present two groups of models to deal with the siting in offshore operations applying the main environmental conservation approach and recommandations. Concerning the siting, we present a multi-criteria, GIS-based model (GoldSET Spatial), developed by Golder, that allows to spatially classify the marine areas. The model provides suitability maps that allow to rank and to evaluate the feasibility of human activities. For O&G operations, it may support the location of the facilities (e.g. the pipeline corridors and the landing approaches). The model is a transparent and replicable tool to evaluate alternative scenarios and to include the view of the different stakeholders. We also illustrate two ecological tools:
the species distribution model to determine the patterns of species/habitat distributions; and
the seascape model, assessing the relationship between ecological features and spatial patterns.
These tools provide important information that may also feed the GoldSET Spatial model to further improve the site-selection process.
