Management of marine data for compliance monitoring: an oil and gas case study

The oil and gas industry in WA is expanding fast. With this comes the inevitable prospect of potential environmental effects. Regulators develop compliance-monitoring rules and regulations by which the industry must abide, or face interruptions. This process is not new; however, the size of the projects and timelines in which adherence to these guidelines must be reported is new. This was the case for the Marine Monitoring Project for the Chevron-operated Gorgon Project. Previous marine compliance monitoring projects involved the storage of field data in spreadsheets with various formulas created and updated manually. To continue with this approach was a large risk as shown by the Marine Monitoring Project. To solve this problem, all project data was captured in the field and transmitted near real time using satellite communication technology. The data was stored in a central repository and made available to all project stakeholders. This involved the development of a data-management system that was core to delivering hundreds of reports to the client and regulator on the state of the marine environment during the program of work. With this data-management system set up and operating efficiently, the environmental scientists could analyse the data and provide the latest view of the measured environmental parameters. These results were far more defensible having been through processes that captured the QA steps along the way and provided assurance that the results being relied on for project decisions were accurate. The Gorgon Project is one of the world's largest natural gas projects and the largest single-resource project in Australian history. It is operated by an Australian subsidiary of Chevron and is a joint venture of the Australian subsidiaries of Chevron (47.3%), ExxonMobil (25%), Shell (25%), Osaka Gas (1.25%), Tokyo Gas (1%), and Chubu Electric Power (0.417%).