Current Call

Offshore exploration and production creates undesirable liquid, solid, and gaseous wastes that must be managed. In Atlantic Canada, the Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board and the Canada-Nova Scotia Offshore Petroleum Board publish guidelines that recommend practices and standards for the treatment and disposal of wastes from a variety of sources, and for ensuring compliance with these practices and standards. Wastes include air emissions, drilling muds and cuttings, and produced water.  Operators typically strive to minimize initial waste creation, and employ a variety of technologies to reduce undesirable elements of the waste stream to permissible levels prior to discharge. Sampling and analysis tools are used to monitor the waste treatment process. Waste removed from the production process is managed offshore or transported onshore for further treatment.

The offshore industry, in Atlantic Canada and around the world, generally faces ongoing regulatory and economic pressure to reduce emissions; with an explicit goal of “zero emissions” already in place in some regions. New or improved technologies and other advances to help industry minimize waste production and/or improve treatment and monitoring are the primary focus of PRAC’s Call 10 - “Offshore Environmental Technologies”.  Benefits should include improved environmental performance and/or reduced cost of treating and disposing of offshore wastes.

Specific opportunities encompass solid, liquid and gaseous waste management projects:

• Environmental management/modeling tools (e.g. in-field modeling)
• Enhanced water quality monitoring
• Improved analyzers and monitoring tools (Improvements may entail enhanced reliability, accuracy, simplicity, capability (e.g. constituent measurement), etc.)
• Reduction of oil in cuttings and discharge
• “End-of-pipe” emission controls
• Cuttings transport
• Cuttings and other waste disposal (e.g. onshore remediation)
• Performance measurement of environmental technologies
• Flare reduction strategies/technologies
• Reduced CO2 discharge
• Flare recovery
• Reduced emissions from secondary sources (e.g. turbines)
• Fugitive emissions/hydrocarbon leak detection/mitigation

Oil spills, while not considered a waste treatment issue, are also of interest in the current Call. Specific project opportunities related to oil spills include:

For invited full proposals to be considered eligible for evaluation, PRAC must have received an electronic copy (PDF or Word) of the submission on or before the deadline date of July 10th 2009 by close of business (5:00 pm AST) to: jennifer.pinks@pr-ac.ca.

Additionally, an original signed copy must have been mailed, couriered or hand delivered to either our Halifax or St. John’s office.   If the electronic submission was confirmed as received by the deadline date of July 10th 2009, the original signed copy must have been received by either of our PRAC offices within three (3) business days following the deadline date.  For Call 10, that date was July 15th 2009 by 5:00 pm AST.

The original signed copy should have been sent to either:

Reminder:  for Joint PRAC-NSERC submissions, the package must have included the PRAC short form and NSERC Forms 100 and 101.  Please do not submit the NSERC forms directly to NSERC – they must have been sent to PRAC first for processing, then forwarded on to NSERC by PRAC.

If you have any further questions about submitting your proposal, please do not hesitate to call Jennifer Pinks, Research Grants Manager at (902) 494-2960.

Proposal Forms

PRAC Full Form [PDF] [MS Word]           PRAC Short Form [PDF] [MS Word] 

NSERC Form 100 [PDF]                        NSERC Form 101 [PDF]