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SEA2 Existing Activities
Man has been using the sea in manifold ways for many centuries. This report considers human activities in the North Sea which might have an impact on, or themselves be affected by, further oil and gas developments in the SEA2 areas.
The activities include shipping, energy (both existing oil and gas developments and renewable energy), telecommunications, military activities, waste disposal, dredging and aggregate extraction, marine archaeological sites and wrecks.
Commercial fishing is the subject of a separate report.
Some of the human activities cited above are largely confined to coastal regions, inshore of the SEA2 areas under consideration, for example waste disposal sites and sites for offshore wind power development.
Other activities overlap the SEA2 areas, for example shipping and telecommunications cables. In the southern North Sea shipping traffic is considerably busier than in the central and northern North Sea.
The future of the offshore oil and gas industry is also reviewed. It is now a mature industry and, while new installations are being established in some locations, the decommissioning of other installations is already in progress elsewhere.
After some three decades of operations in the North Sea, about half of the recoverable oil and gas has been produced.
The new fields being discovered are considerably smaller than those discovered in the 1970s.
This report was produced by Cordah Ltd, a multi-disciplinary environmental management consultancy.
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