Environmental Effects of Offshore Oil Production

The Buccaneer Gas and Oil Field Study has been the most comprehensive research project to date concerned with assessing the ecological effects of offshore production activities. It took nearly five years to complete and involved almost 30 individual research groups. All of the raw data have been archived with NOAA's Environmental Data and Information Services, and detailed technical reports have been deposited with the National Technical Information Service so the interested investigator should be able to gain access to them. However, we felt that it would be desirable to present a distillation of our more significant findings in a form that was more readily available to the scientific and lay community. Thus, we conducted a symposium. on the study during EXPOCHEM '80 at the Astrohall, Houston, Texas during October, 1980. This volume comprises the proceedings of that symposium. All but two of the papers presented are included in this book. Manuscripts were not received from Dr. D. A. Wiesenburg (Texas A&M University: Volatile Hydrocarbons) or Dr. J. Tillery (Southwest Research Institute: Trace Metals), but these topics are adequately covered by other authors. An introductory chapter was added to place the study in its proper perspective and to provide some background material on the Buccaneer Field, a brief chapter on biocides was inserted since this topic generated much dis­ cussion at the symposium, and a bibliography is provided to direct the interested reader to sources of additional published infor­ mation on the Study.