Water Column Study in the Monitoring Plan of the First Italian Offshore LNG Terminal

The first Italian offshore terminal for storing and regasifying liquefied natural gas, located in the North Adriatic Sea, started the operational activities in 2009. Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) elaborated and carried out the monitoring plan or the marine environment, in order to assess potential environmental impacts linked to the project. In this paper we present the monitoring activities conducted on the water column in order to study hydrodynamic and physical-chemical characterization in the offshore area close to the regasification terminal, to assess the hydrodynamism variation due to the terminal presence and the fate of the cold water’s discharge linked to the process of vaporization. The terminal influences the evolution of marine currents in the immediate vicinity, causing a departure from the general flow and also the thermal features of the water column but from a distance of a few tens of meters from the terminal this effect disappears.