Abstract
Ecological risk assessment (ERA) is a tool used by many regulatory agencies to evaluate the impact to ecological receptors from changes in environmental conditions. Widespread use of ERAs began with the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program to assess the ecological impact from hazardous chemicals released to the environment. Many state hazardous chemical regulatory agencies have adopted the use of ERAs, and several state regulatory agencies are evaluating the use of ERAs to assess ecological impacts from releases of petroleum and gas-related products. Typical ERAs are toxicologically-based, use conservative assumptions with respect to ecological receptor exposure duration and frequency, often require complex modeling of transport and exposure and are very labor intensive. In an effort to streamline the ERA process, efforts are currently underway to develop default soil screening levels, to identify ecological screening criteria for excluding sites from formal risk assessment, and to create risk-based corrective action worksheets. This should help reduce the time spent on ERAs, at least for some sites. Work is also underway to incorporate bioavailability and spatial considerations into ERAs. By evaluating the spatial nature of contaminant releases with respect to the spatial context of the ecosystem under consideration, more realistic ERAs with respect to the actual impact to ecological receptors at the population, community or ecosystem scale should be possible. In addition, by considering the spatial context, it should be possible to develop mitigation and monitoring efforts to more appropriately address such sites within the context of an ecological framework.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Society of Petroleum Engineers - SPE/EPA/DOE Exploration and Production Environmental Conference 2001, EPEC 2001 |
| Publisher | Society of Petroleum Engineers |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781555639327 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2001 |
| Event | SPE/EPA/DOE Exploration and Production Environmental Conference 2001, EPEC 2001 - San Antonio, United States Duration: Feb 26 2001 → Feb 28 2001 |
Publication series
| Name | Society of Petroleum Engineers - SPE/EPA/DOE Exploration and Production Environmental Conference 2001, EPEC 2001 |
|---|
Conference
| Conference | SPE/EPA/DOE Exploration and Production Environmental Conference 2001, EPEC 2001 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | United States |
| City | San Antonio |
| Period | 02/26/01 → 02/28/01 |
Funding
The authors would like to thank Pat O'Brien and Sara McMillen of Chevron, and other members of the PERF 99-01 team for stimulating discussions on the concepts presented in this paper. The authors would also like to thank Nancy Comstock of the Department of Energy's National Petroleum Technology Office for financial support through the Natural Gas and Oil Technology Partnership Program. Jim Kercher and Charles Hall of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) provided figures 4 and 5, respectively. Kim Heyward of LLNL provided support in preparing the figures. Work partially performed under the auspices of the U. S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract W-7405-Eng-48 and by Oak Ridge National Laboratory under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with UT-Battelle, LLC. LLNL document number UCRL-JC-140535.