Nontargeted Screening to Unravel Offshore Wind Farm Chemical Fingerprints
David Vanavermaete1, Pablo Zapata-Corella2, Karien De Cauwer3
1Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Animal Sciences Unit─Aquatic Environment and Quality, Ostend 8400, Belgium.
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Offshore wind farms (OWFs) play a crucial role in reducing carbon emissions and fossil fuel dependence, and their expansion is essential for meeting European energy and climate targets. Understanding their ecological impact is therefore essential. While many environmental impacts of OWFs are systematically monitored, chemical emissions remain largely overlooked. To address this gap, sediment samples were collected within and around OWFs in the Belgian and German parts of the North Sea, along with reference samples from three types of reference sites. Non-target screening using GC-MS-EI and LC-HRMS-ESI± detected over 8000 compounds. Most of these compounds were omnipresent in the whole study area, but more than 1000 showed significantly higher abundance inside OWFs. Tentative identification suggests that some of these compounds originate from epoxy and polyurethane coatings. These findings suggest that OWFs contribute to the release of chemicals into the environment. However, the impact and effects of these chemicals are still unknown.
