Best practise in deep-water
environmental performance

Deep-sea and open-ocean regions are becoming increasingly important to various commercial concerns (oil, fishing, pharmaceuticals, mining, telecommunications etc.). In most cases this involves moving in to areas that are more-or-less previously unexplored by Industry or marine scientists. Responsible companies operating in these new deep-water territories will wish to comply with in-house, national, multi-national and international requirements and guidelines on environmental performance.

NOCS has a very long history of research in this field:

Our founder organisation, the “Discovery Investigations”, operating the original Royal Reseach Ship Discovery, were formed in the 1920s and charged with investigating the ecology and biodiversity of the Southern Ocean as it related to the Whaling Industry. They were, in part, funded by a tax on whale oil.

The first Royal Research Ship Discovery, used in our studies of the environmental impact of the whaling industry in the Southern Ocean.
We still operate a Royal Research Ship Discovery (the third of that name) and continue to work closely with Industries and Governments concerned with deep-sea and open-ocean resources. Today, this is mostly with the oil exploration and production industries and their regulators.

We have worked with most oil companies with deep-water interests, either individually, as consortia (e.g. the Atlantic Frontier Environmental Network, AFEN) or within industry bodies (e.g. the International Association of Oil & Gas producers, OGP). We have also worked closely with regulatory bodies, both in the UK (Marine Scotland; Joint Nature Conservation Committee; Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Fisheries Research Services; Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) and in international fora (UN International Seabed Authority; UN Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea).

We pride ourselves on providing impartial science-based advice to all responsible stakeholders in deep-sea and open-ocean matters. In addition to Industry we also work with non-governmental organisations concerned with deep-water environments (e.g. World Wide Fund for nature, WWF; the International Union for Conservation of Nature, IUCN).

Compared with the situation on land, marine systems generally are poorly understood. However our knowledge of shallow waters is orders of magnitude more complete than that of the deep-sea environment. With some justification the deep oceans have been called “inner space”.

NOCS ultra-large-scale deep-sea environmental surveys in UK waters As industries move into increasingly deep waters off the continental shelf, they move into environments about which we know less and less. Environments in which it becomes more difficult to accurately predict the impact of their operations, and in which the practical problems of environmental data gathering are much increased.

Almost all aspects of environmental operations in deep water, from survey strategy, through sampling to analysis and interpretation, require a different approach from the more familiar shallow-water operations. Simply replicating the routine approaches from decades of previous shallow-water experience is unlikely to be efficient or effective in assessing environmental sensitivities, predicting potential impacts, or monitoring environmental performance in the deep sea.

In shallow-water environments, Industry will normally turn to familiar commercial consultancy businesses to meet their environmental needs. However, very few of these consultancies have true deep-sea experience and expertise, that still lies almost exclusively with research institutions such as NOCS.

At NOCS we believe that knowledge exchange among research institutions, Industry and their environmental partners is the most effective means of meeting the challenges of deep-sea environmental assessment and moving towards best practise in deep-water environmental performance.