The Buccaneer Gas and Oil Field Study has been the most comprehensive
research project to date concerned with assessing the ecological effects
of offshore production activities. It took nearly five years to complete
and involved almost 30 individual research groups. All of the raw data
have been archived with NOAA's Environmental Data and Information
Services, and detailed technical reports have been deposited with the
National Technical Information Service so the interested investigator
should be able to gain access to them. However, we felt that it would be
desirable to present a distillation of our more significant findings in
a form that was more readily available to the scientific and lay
community. Thus, we conducted a symposium. on the study during EXPOCHEM
'80 at the Astrohall, Houston, Texas during October, 1980. This volume
comprises the proceedings of that symposium. All but two of the papers
presented are included in this book. Manuscripts were not received from
Dr. D. A. Wiesenburg (Texas A&M University: Volatile Hydrocarbons) or
Dr. J. Tillery (Southwest Research Institute: Trace Metals), but these
topics are adequately covered by other authors. An introductory chapter
was added to place the study in its proper perspective and to provide
some background material on the Buccaneer Field, a brief chapter on
biocides was inserted since this topic generated much dis- cussion at
the symposium, and a bibliography is provided to direct the interested
reader to sources of additional published infor- mation on the Study.