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Radiological risk assessment to marine biota from exposure to NORM from a decommissioned offshore oil and gas pipeline

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posted on 2023-05-21, 14:29 authored by MacIntosh, A, Koppel, DJ, Johansen, MP, Beresford, NA, Copplestone, D, Beth PenroseBeth Penrose, Cresswell, T
Scale residues can accumulate on the interior surfaces of subsea petroleum pipes and may incorporate naturally occurring radioactive materials (NORM). The persistent nature of 'NORM scale' may result in a radiological dose to the organisms living on or near intact pipelines. Following a scenario of in-situ decommissioning of a subsea pipeline, marine organisms occupying the exteriors or interiors of petroleum structures may have close contact with the scale or other NORM-associated contaminated substances and suffer subsequent radiological effects. This case study used radiological dose modelling software, including the ERICA Tool (v2.0), MicroShield® Pro and mathematical equations, to estimate the likely radiological doses and risks of effects from NORM-contaminated scale to marine biota from a decommissioned offshore oil and gas pipeline. Using activity concentrations of NORM (226Ra, 210Po, 210Pb, 228Ra, 228Th) from a subsea pipeline from Australia, environmental realistic exposure scenarios including radiological exposures from both an intact pipe (external only; accounting for radiation shielding by a cylindrical carbon steel pipe) and a decommissioned pipeline with corrosive breakthrough (resulting in both internal and external radiological exposure) were simulated to estimate doses to model marine organisms. Predicted dose rates for both the external only exposure (ranging from 26 μGy/h to 33 μGy/h) and a corroded pipeline (ranging from 300 μGy/h to 16,000 μGy/h) exceeded screening levels for radiological doses to environmental receptors. The study highlighted the importance of using scale-specific solubility data (i.e., Kd) values for individual NORM radionuclides for ERICA assessments. This study provides an approach for conducting marine organism dose assessments for NORM-contaminated subsea pipelines and highlights scientific gaps required to undertake risk assessments necessary to inform infrastructure decommissioning planning.

History

Publication title

Journal of Environmental Radioactivity

Volume

251-252

Article number

106979

Number

106979

Pagination

1-14

ISSN

0265-931X

Department/School

Tasmanian Institute of Agriculture (TIA)

Publisher

Elsevier Sci Ltd

Place of publication

The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford, England, Oxon, Ox5 1Gb

Rights statement

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License, (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

Repository Status

  • Open

Socio-economic Objectives

Oil and gas exploration

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    University Of Tasmania

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