Of Corals and Web Portals: Towards a Digital Representation of Risk for the Cold-Water Corals in the Oil and Gas Sector

Abstract

Integrated Operations in the oil and gas industry depend on highly cooperative yet computer-mediated and distributed workflows across complex information infrastructures. In particular, offshore operations rely heavily on digital technologies to gain remote access to subsea oil or natural gas fields, and are at the same time subject to strict requirements by authorities to prevent pollution in the marine environment. Operators are consequently dependent on models and representations to assess and predict environmental risk. However, the heterogeneous disciplines operating a field cannot count on a shared perspective on environmental risk as their activities span across organizational and political boundaries. We present a case study from a Norwegian oil and gas company that is developing a set of tools and methodologies for providing heterogeneous users with awareness of the risk for the cold-water coral reefs off the coasts of Norway. In particular, we focus on the articulation work carried on to let representations and models compensate for the inevitable lack of shared awareness of environmental risk while at the same time fit the existing sociotechnical infrastructure. We discuss actors’ strategies to foreground the infrastructure by: (1) bootstrapping the environmental data; (2) mediating with the existing corporate infrastructure; and (3) enacting the subsea context for operators.