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An Improved Method to Estimate the Probability of Oil Spill Contact to Environmental Resources in the Gulf of Mexico

The oil spill risk analysis (OSRA) model is a tool used by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) to evaluate oil spill risks to biological, physical, and socioeconomic resources that could be exposed to oil spill contact from oil and gas leasing, exploration, or development on the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). Using long-term hindcast winds and ocean currents, the OSRA model generates hundreds of thousands of trajectories from hypothetical oil spill locations and derives the probability of contact to these environmental resources in the U.S. OCS. This study generates probability of oil spill contact maps by initiating trajectories from hypothetical oil spill points over the entire planning areas in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico (GOM) OCS and tabulating the contacts over the entire waters in the GOM. Therefore, a probability of oil spill contact database that stores information of the spill points and contacts can be created for a given set of wind and current data such that the probability of oil spill contact to any environmental resources from future leasing areas can be estimated without a rerun of the OSRA model. The method can be applied to other OCS regions and help improve BOEM’s decision-making process.