Priority-setting regarding offshore substances and preparations

2. OSPAR regulation of offshore chemicals

2.1 Background

At the Third International Conference on the protection of the North Sea (the Hague 1990), the ministers of the North Sea States requested the Paris Commission to develop and adopt a harmonised mandatory control system for the discharge and use of chemicals offshore. This was further confirmed by the ministers at the first ministerial meeting of the Oslo and Paris Commissions (Paris 1992) who agreed upon an action plan which among other things called for a reduction of the discharge of noxious chemicals taking into account the best environmental practice. In order to fulfil these requirements, two main activities were initiated: the development of a Harmonised Offshore Chemicals Notification Format (HOCNF), and the development of a Chemical Hazard Assessment and Risk Management model (the CHARM model). In 1996, the Paris Commission agreed on PARCOM Decision 96/3 on the use and discharge of offshore chemicals, which prescribes a pre-screening step and encompasses the use of HOCNF and the CHARM model or similar models.

The present project is intended to build upon and support these initiatives and they are therefore described briefly below. For detailed information please refer to the references cited. It should be noted that, at the initiation of the project, there was a general lack of knowledge on the chemicals used offshore. Today, it is mandatory that operators must supply information to the competent authorities before use.

2.2 HOCNF

In order to harmonise the data that are to be submitted to the different national authorities responsible for the environment of the North Sea, PARCOM has prepared the Harmonised Offshore Chemicals Notification Format 1995 (HOCNF). In this format, data must be submitted on general aspects (e.g. supplier, use, discharge, composition, hazard labelling, physico-chemical properties) and on ecotoxicological properties (e.g. log P_ow, bioconcentration and biodegradability of the deliberately added substances, and aquatic and sediment toxicity of the preparation).

2.3 The CHARM model

In 1992, Norway and the Netherlands initiated a common project on development of a model (the CHARM model) for environmental hazard assessment and risk management of offshore chemicals. The project was carried out by TNO (the Netherlands) and Aquateam (Norway). The model is intended to be used as a tool for the harmonised regulation of the use of chemicals in the offshore industry in the North Sea.

The CHARM model, version 3, is described in Karman et al. (1996) and Karman & Vik (1996). The basic principle of the hazard assessment part of the model is that it calculates the discharge of an offshore chemical and the resulting Predicted Environmental Concentrations (PECs) in different environmental compartments. The PEC is then compared with a predicted No-Effect-Concentration (PNEC) thus establishing the PEC:PNEC ratio (Hazard Quotient) for each of the environmental compartments considered. The hazard assessment, which is in fact a generic risk assessment, is conducted in a scenario with a standard platform.

A pre-screening module, which is relatively vaguely developed, is included in the CHARM model. The model finally includes a local risk assessment module in which a user-defined scenario is applied and a risk management module. The Danish EPA intends to use the CHARM hazard assessment/generic risk assessment module except in special cases, in which for instance a local site assessment would imply a stricter regulation than the generic risk assessment.