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Checking the quality of sea water in the vicinity of offshore oil production sites takes place every two months or yearly. Periodic monitoring is performed by collecting in-situ water samples that are then analyzed in specialized laboratories, primarily using chromatographic or spectroscopic techniques for the organic&inorganic contaminant identification, if present in the sample. This type of approach cannot be exploited to implement strategies for prevention of environmental disasters and therefore, since the public opinion and several international regulations require greater attention to the environment care, it is necessary to evolve current monitoring systems into one that can alert in real time an intervention team, so to avoid pollution, often irreversible, of the water.
The exploitation of deposits, whether they are oil or gas, involves the production of waste, including the produced formation water (PFW). PFW is the most relevant type of effluent in the production phase of hydrocarbons on offshore installations, both for the generated volumes and for the level of pollutants potentially present. Downstream the purification treatment, the production of water for the sea discharge appears as a heterogeneous mixture, constituted by an aqueous phase with the residual solid material in suspension. The aqueous phase contains inorganic chemical species (salts, metals and radioisotopes) and organic (mono-compounds, polycyclic aromatic, aliphatic hydrocarbons,...).
The proposed solution to overcome the current limits in terms of offshore environmental monitoring and significantly improve the operational scenario is that of a sensing platform capable of sampling at least daily (or more frequently as a function of the associated risk analysis) the waters near a site of interest, activating an ON&OFF procedure about the presence or absence of contaminants and eventually preparing the collected samples for a more accurate, quantitative and lawful analysis in case of activated alarm. The design of the platform takes advantage of microfluidic (Lab-On-Chip) technologies for the management of the fluids and the in-situ analysis of marine sample. This approach will involve a dramatic reduction of the sample and reagents volumes, a prolonged monitoring and a greater space coverage around offshore platforms without a noticeable loss of performance in terms of sensitivity.
