Abstract
The term Integrated Environmental Monitoring (IEM) refers to the tight coupling of sensor based real-time environmental monitoring with day-to-day operations. In that perspective IEM extends the traditional meaning of the term environmental monitoring by including discharge control, leak detection and remote sensing. Using offshore operations as an example, environmental monitoring has often been perceived to mean off-line sampling of seabed sediments and the water column during annual and triennial campaigns by ship. Whereas such monitoring has its place in a total monitoring programme, advances in technology and methodology open up for more flexible and real-time sensor based monitoring which can be tied closely to daily operations in the oil and gas industry. A multidisciplinary approach is sought to address these challenges, where input is needed from diverse domains as marine biology, subsea field development, sensor instrumentation and organization development. IEM relies on the presence of several technical and organizational capabilities. Some of these are similar to what has been developed in other areas of the oil & gas industry, for example through increased use of real-time data in drilling and well operations or in the cross-discipline collaboration variously labelled Integrated Operations, e-Field or Digital Oilfield. IEM applies this experience to the environmental monitoring domain. Statoil is currently developing an architecture or a new capability platform to take advantage of these opportunities. This platform has the following layers: intelligent infrastructure, information and collaboration, knowledge sharing & analytics and finally business operations. The paper presents how Statoil sees environmental monitoring over the life-cycle of a field and the overall architecture/platform for Integrated Environmental Monitoring (IEM) will be presented together with some of the focused development areas.
