Sustainable Development in the Oil and Gas Industry
Authors: Arscott Lyn 
Published: December 2007

The planet is threatened by rapidly rising population and the accompanying impact on the environment. However, the environment will not be protected unless societies develop a satisfactory level of social and economic capital. The appropriate balance of environmental, social and economic capital is the challenge of sustainable development. The availability of a plentiful and economic supply of energy is a requirement for the economic and social pillars of sustainable development. Oil and gas will be a major component of the global energy mix for many years until alternate sources of energy become available and economic. During this transition period, the oil and gas industry has an important role to play in managing its operations safely and in reducing emissions, discharges and ecological impact while providing energy at a reasonable cost. This paper will review some of the most critical environmental challenges facing the world today including pollution, biodiversity and global climate change, and review the progress and challenges for the International Oil and Gas Industry. Suggestions for the future role of Non-Government Organizations (NGO's), Governments and Industry Associations will also be presented.

Introduction

The decade of the 1970's was a watershed year for International Environmentalism. The first US Earth day was held in 1970, the same year as the US Environmental Agency (EPA) was created. The first United Nations (UN) Conference on Human Environment was held in Stockholm in 1972 which lead to the formation of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). During that decade, governments reacted to the public concern about the environment by enacting a raft of legislation. For Example, the US Congress enacted the seminal legislation for clean water, clean air and the management of waste. The hard work of activists and writers such as Rachael Carson with her 1962 book, Silent Spring,1 had started to pay off. The momentum of environmental activity gained even more energy in the 1980's as a result of public outrage over some very serious, environmentally damaging accidents such as Bhopal ('84), Chernobyl ('86) and Valdez ('89).

The response by industry to the avalanche of regulation and public concern was to design and implement management systems for Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) to ensure management, shareholders, customers, communities and governments that industrial operations were in compliance with the letter and the spirit of the new laws. Corporate environmentalism was comprehensively incorporated into corporate policies and procedures during the late 1980's and early 1990's. These management systems grew during the 1990's to encompass not only HSE but also social responsibility and ethical issues such as anti-corruption policies. Also during the 1990's, there was growing recognition of the interrelationship between economic prosperity, environmental quality and social justice. The term, "Sustainable Development", became the catchword in government and corporate circles to include these three pillars of human development.

Sustainable Development or Management of Change

The natural history of the world can be characterized by one word, change. Given that change is ubiquitous and inescapable, what then does "sustainability" mean in terms of human development? Consider that there have been at least 5 massive extinctions of species over the past 300 million years, most probably as a result of meteoric impacts2, and over the past 2.4 million years, there have been 17 glacial oscillations30. We are currently enjoying a warming period called the Holocene that started about 12,000 years ago but even during this period of generally rising temperatures, there have been some temperature swings. Between 800 AD and 1300 AD, there was a medieval warm period when the Vikings colonized Greenland. In comparison, around the middle of the second millennium, Henry VIII could build bonfires on the frozen Thames River in a cooler period known as the Little Ice Age. Over the past century, the global average surface temperature has risen about 0.6°C which is the largest increase in any century during the past 1,000 years39, primarily, as a result of human activity.