Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Offshore oil spills can not only cause significantly negative impacts on the environment and socio-economy but constitutes a direct hazard to marine life and human health. It is reported that in the last decade over 1 billion gallons of oil spilled worldwide and 6 million t/yr entered the oceans. Over 20 years passed after the Exxon Valdez spill, the significant efforts have been made to study oil spills and improve response practices; however, it is obviously not enough to match the steps of oil and gas development. The 2010 BP oil spill is shaping up to be one of the largest offshore oil spills and an ecological nightmare, disclosing the disturbing fact of unpreparedness of industry and governments to major spills as well as the pressing needs in oil spill research. Even though the policy or regulations focusing on framework or infrastructure is relative consummate, inadequate decision support can be one of the major reasons that embarrassed the efficiency of response process. Furthermore, such situation is challenged by harsh environments (e.g., cold water/weather, strong wind, rough wave, and sea ice) that are prevailing in the offshore areas of Arctic and Northern Atlantic oceans. Oil spills are more problematical in such environments due to the fragile ecosystems and the logistic challenges and thus, more dynamic, efficient response decision support is much desired. Given the increasing spill risks caused by the fast growth of energy industries in northern Canada, it becomes noticeably critical and urgent to develop new methodologies and improve knowledge bases and technical capacities of spill responses in harsh environments.*To help address the challenges and meet the needs, the short-term goals of this proposed research program are a) to develop a set of risk-based multi-agent simulation-optimization approaches for offshore oil spill response management (RMASOS) in harsh environments, and b) to conduct lab and field tests to understand and simulate response processes, as well as validate and demonstrate the developed approaches. The long-term goals are: a) to grow the current research & training program into a more active, world-class one in spill responses & decision making in harsh environments; and b) by advancing scientific bases and generating engineering solutions to fill up the gaps and help address the long-term pressing needs of improving response capability and effectiveness. To achieve the these goals, the key tasks include: 1) Oil spill risk assessment and mapping; 2) Experimental tests and modeling of oil weathering and movement; 3) Simulation-based screening of response technologies; 4) Experimental simulation and modeling of skimming; 5) Risk-based simulation-optimization coupling for resources allocation and operation optimization; 6) Response decision support based on multi-agent aided simulation-optimization; and 7) Field tests and demonstration. *The proposed research program and the expected outcomes should be able to 1) help fill the knowledge and technical gaps, 2) contribute to significant advance of environmental emergency and decision making research, and 3) directly address urgent and critical needs (particularly raised by the 2010 BP oil spill) in improving emergency response capacity of governments and industries in Canada and beyond. The program will be the first of its kind in Canada targeting offshore oil spill responses in harsh environments. Unique multi-disciplinary environments will also be created for training of HQP and collaborative research opportunities for researchers. The research would bring significant short-/long-term benefits to industry, government and communities and help mitigate the risks posed by accidental pollution to the marine and coastal ecosystems.