The offshore environment around the Norwegian coastline provides a diverse range of depths and habitats with many interesting ecological communities. Although research in this area has been prevalent in recent years, much of the deepwater environment remains untouched and unseen.
Statoil, Norway's largest oil and gas company, has assets from the Barents Sea to the North Sea from 100m to nearly 2000m water depth. These assets provide Statoil and the SERPENT Project with a unique opportunity for collaboration.
To obtain goals on zero harm to the environment and protection of the biodiversity, this collaboration needs to combine the use of existing environmental monitoring methodology with development of novel methodology. This is important because we need a continued focus on improving monitoring methods to deal with challenges both at home on the Norwegian continental shelf and internationally.
Statoil's objective is to carry out all its operations without harming the environment. SERPENT provides a tool to bring the most up-to-date scientific approaches into the monitoring and assessment process, whilst exploring the ecology of the area and seeking to develop new methods for assessment and monitoring.
The results will be actively used in Statoil's internal control system and may lead to new improvement measures, better methods of analysis and mathematical models that can predict the effects of operations.
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