New focus area for regulation of seismic surveys

The Regulator 2022 - Issue 2

There is always a chance that unintended environmental impacts can occur at sea. Through its compliance monitoring activities, NOPSEMA identified and took action on several issues relating to potential environmental harm from seismic surveys in Commonwealth waters.

Through our inspection program and investigation of incidents, NOPSEMA observed some instances of titleholders failing to fully implement control measures to manage sound and protect marine animals in biologically important areas.

This failure can be particularly serious when affected species are protected under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act and have recovery plans in place that identify anthropogenic noise as a high priority threat for management.

A recent example of significant non-compliance occurred when a titleholder discharged underwater noise in a biologically important area when there was a higher-than-expected presence of endangered blue whales. Where serious breaches are identified, NOPSEMA will investigate and launch proportionate enforcement action.

Other examples where plans have not been fully implemented include:

• Intrusions into exclusion zones for turtles during their nesting periods and commercially important fish species during their spawning periods.
• Not effectively implementing reporting and notification protocols to allow other marine users, such as commercial fishers, to plan their operations to avoid negative interactions.
• Adaptive management measures not being applied when predictions in the environment plan are proven to be unreliable.

For example, not ceasing night time operations when passive acoustic monitoring failed to detect whales at night after detecting high numbers of whales during the day.

Significant incidents rarely happen, but the observations above serve as important case studies into the implications of not having an effective environmental management system in place.

These systems should include specific measures to monitor and manage the implementation of control measures, ensure they are being implemented effectively, and allow timely action to be taken when issues are identified.

We want titleholders to ensure they can prevent things going wrong rather than being identified when it is too late to take effective corrective action.

As a result, NOPSEMA will be implementing a new focus area on environmental management systems for the assessment and inspection of marine seismic surveys.

This focus area will be implemented over the next 12 months and will provide broad insights into the effectiveness of environmental management systems at ensuring the impacts of surveys continue to be managed to ALARP and acceptable levels during activities.

Observations from this focus area will be shared with industry to facilitate continuous improvement