This project comprised underwater video surveys to determine the composition of benthic faunal assemblages, seafloor habitat mapping, sediment classification boundary delineation and groundtruthing, and mapping on belanf of URS Qatar LLC, which was contracted by RasGas Company Limited to conduct an Environmental, Socio-economic and Health Impact Assessment for the Barzan Projec.
This project was designed to supply Qatar with its domestic gas supply. Natural gas, condensate, and produced water were designed to be conveyed as a mixture to onshore facilities through two 32 inch export pipelines and allow separation of the components and dehydration of the gas onshore at the Barzan gas plant located within Ras Laffan Industrial City, located approximately 90km from Doha on the north east of Qatar. The pipelines were laid on the seabed from the offshore platforms to within a few kilometers of shore, at which point they would be buried using open trench and backfill construction methods. To this end, a requirement of the Ministry of Environment (MoE) was to conduct a littoral Ecological Baseline Survey (EBS) of the proposed pipeline corridor.
MRF’s scope of works involved conducting stratified, complementary surveys via video transects and photographic surveys to provide an overview of species coverage, which were then used to provide both a qualitative and quantitative description of the survey zone with regard to corals and seagrasses.
