SAR polarimetry to monitor offshore oil rigs

Human environmental impact mitigation is strongly associated to the sustainability philosophy, i.e., a new economy that emphasizes the value of common goods along with a change in temporal perspectives of human activities on the Planet [1], [2]. A sustainable economy is not only good for the environment but even for the economy itself although the path of innovation is clearly crippled by contrasting interests. For example, the transition from an oil society to a green society is quite hard to be fully accomplished. According to the Oil Market report provided by the International Energy Agency (IEA) for 2022 [3], oil demand growth has been increased to 2.3 mb/d (+140 kb/d) for 2022 as a whole and in 2023 it is expected to grow further.

Within such a framework, even Italy has increased oil production in latest years to 63 TWh. Worldwide, 30% of oil production relies on offshore oil rigs making at risk the ocean environment. Hence, oil-related marine pollution induced by offshore oil field activities is a serious threat for ocean ecosystem and the whole marine environment.

In such a contradictory world, it is of paramount importance to contribute with new non-cooperative technologies to monitor the impact of such high-risk oil production infrastructures in order to both prevent oil spills and to support remediation and mitigation operations in case of accidents. In this study, two alternative approaches based on fine-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) polarimetric satellite images are presented and analyzed to observe offshore oil rigs. The latter allow a non-cooperative large-scale continuous monitoring of both the critical infrastructures and the related oil discharges. The presented approaches are physically-based, i.e., they rely on the extraction of the different scattering properties characterizing the oil rig and the surrounding sea surface, and result in effective near real-time processing.

 

 

References

[1] Nicholas Stern, Why Are We Waiting? -The Logic, Urgency, and Promise of Tackling Climate Change, MIT press, 2015.

[2] Maurizio Migliaccio, Andrea Buono and Matteo Alparone, “Microwave satellite remote sensing for a sustainable sea”, European Journal of Remote Sensing, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 507–519, 2022.

[3] IEA (2022), Oil Market Report - December 2022, IEA, Paris, available at: https://www.iea.org/reports/oil-market