The Norwegian government issued in 1998 White Paper No. 58 followed by the"Zero discharge report" requiring the oil industry operating in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea to develop a strategy for reaching "zero environmental harmful discharges" of produced water (PW) within 2005. As a result Miljøsok proposed to develop a management tool based on environmental risk and hazard assessment to identify the most potential environmentally harmful discharges of PW, and to quantify the environmental benefit of different actions to reduce these. The Norwegian OilIndustry Association (OLF) working group for PW was asked to develop the Environmental Impact Factor (EIF), and the tool has sofar been applied for PW management on a single platform level. The plan is to elevate this work to a regional scale in order to compare the potential benefit of measures to reduce PW discharges in the whole area, and to form a basis for a cost-effective total approach to PW management. The EIF is based on a combined environmental risk and hazard assessment of PW discharges, accounting for both composition and amount of the discharge. The EIF is also linked to the environmental impact assessment (EIA) studies in the area and the environmental monitoring programme for the water column, initiated in1999. Determination of the EIF for a single platform allows the operator to rank the available technologies for PW discharge reduction on a cost-benefit basis. The EIF identifies the source of potential environmental damage and quantifies the benefit of any action taken to reduce this. Technologies like PW re-injection, treatment and removal or replacement of process chemicals can thus be ranked based on cost and environmental benefit. Introduction Produced water management in the Norwegian waters is currently based on the"Zero impact" mindset, meaning that the ultimate objective is to remove all potential environmentally harmful discharges (1). In general, a number of technological approaches are being considered and developed to meet this challenge;*Re-injection*Treatment*Water shut off*Down-hole separation*Removal or replacement of process chemicals

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This paper briefly summarizes the ERMS project and presents the developed model by showing results from environmental fates and risk calculations of a discharge from offshore drilling operations. The developed model calculates environmental risks for the water column and sediments resulting from exposure to toxic stressors (e.g., chemicals) and nontoxic stressors (e.g., suspended particles, sediment burial). The approach is based on existing risk assessment techniques described in the European Union technical guidance document on risk assessment and species sensitivity distributions. The model calculates an environmental impact factor, which characterizes the overall potential impact on the marine environment in terms of potentially impacted water volume and sediment area. The ERMS project started in 2003 and was finalized in 2007. In total, 28 scientific reports and 9 scientific papers have been delivered from the ERMS project (http://www.sintef.no/erms).

Naphthenic acids (NAs) constitute one of the toxic components of the produced water (PW) from offshore oil platforms discharged into the marine environment. We employed liquid chromatography (LC) coupled to high-resolution mass spectrometry with electrospray ionization (ESI) in negative mode for the comprehensive chemical characterization and quantification of NAs in PW samples from six different Norwegian offshore oil platforms. In total, we detected 55 unique NA isomer groups, out of the 181 screened homologous groups, across all tested samples. The frequency of detected NAs in the samples varied between 14 and 44 isomer groups. Principal component analysis (PCA) indicated a clear distinction of the PW from the tested platforms based on the distribution of NAs in these samples. The averaged total concentration of NAs varied between 6 and 56 mg L–1, among the tested platforms, whereas the concentrations of the individual NA isomer groups ranged between 0.2 and 44 mg L–1. Based on both the distribution and the concentration of NAs in the samples, the C8H14O2 isomer group appeared to be a reasonable indicator of the presence and the total concentration of NAs in the samples with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.89.