An assessment model for the fate and environmental effects of offshore drilling mud discharges

The benthic boundary layer transport (bblt) model was developed to assess potential impact zones from drilling mud discharges from offshore oil and gas drilling. The model focuses on the drift, dispersion and concentration levels of the suspended fraction of the drilling mud fines in the benthic boundary layer with the assumption of a spatially homogeneous environment. The current version of the model includes a wave boundary layer, a breakup module for drilling mud flocs, a dose–response module for scallops, and a graphical user interface (GUI). The GUI was written in Java which makes the code largely platform independent. Simulations of suspended barite concentration near Sable Island on the Scotian Shelf during drilling in the fall of 1999 reproduce the very low concentrations (generally less than 1 μg L−1) observed during the Environmental Effects Monitoring program. However, the simulations also exhibited concentrations in excess of the no-effects concentration for scallops (100 μg L−1) prior to the sampling program. The model estimates that the potential impact on scallops in the vicinity of the drilling is a few days of lost growth over scales of a few kilometers.