Air emissions associated with decommissioning California's offshore oil and gas platforms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The 27 oil and gas platforms offshore southern California are nearing the end of their productive lives and will be decommissioned in the near future. Many are in deep water and are correspondingly large, with the largest, Harmony, in 1200 feet of water and weighing approximately 43 000 tons. Nearly 30% of California's platforms are in water depths that exceed those of any previous decommissioning project anywhere in the world. Decommissioning will involve the operation of diesel-powered heavy equipment for long periods in virtually all phases of the operation (e.g, at the platform, in transit to and from the platform, in port, at offloading, salvage, and recycling facilities) in a region where air quality is a crucial concern for state, federal, and local regulatory agencies, as well as the public. To support future decision making about the choice between decommissioning options, we consider potential air emissions generated under complete and partial (removal to 85 feet below water line) removal options. We describe major emissions categories, and the environmental and human health issues associated with each, and examine how the regulatory system would operate in specific projects. We then describe methods to estimate emissions for a worst-case example involving the largest platform, Harmony. We estimate that complete versus partial removal of Harmony would result, respectively, in 600 or 89 tons of NOx, 50 or 7 tons of carbon monoxide, 29 400 or 4400 tons of CO2, 21 or 3 tons of PM10, and 20 or 3 tons of PM2.5. Complete removal of Harmony's jacket and topsides creates approximately 6.75 times more air pollution than partial removal down to 85 feet below the sea surface. We discuss how the Harmony estimate can be used as a baseline to roughly estimate emissions from decommissioning other platforms, using expected time on station for the major categories of decommissioning equipment. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2015;X:000–000. © 2015 SETAC Key Points The majority of air pollution emissions from platform decommissioning will result from diesel engine combustion during the removal and salvage process. Total air pollution emissions during partial or complete removal varies based on the number of days diesel engines are used. Using the interactive decision model PLATFORM, complete removal of the largest oil platform off the California coast, ExxonMobil's Harmony, would result in an estimated 6.75 times more air pollution than partial removal 85 ft below the sea surface. Complete versus partial removal of Harmony would result, respectively, in 600 or 89 tons of NOx, 50 or 7 tons of carbon monoxide, 29,400 or 4,400 tons of CO2, 21 or 3 tons of PM10, and 20 or 3 tons of PM2.5.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".