Technology Cooperation and Capacity Building - CommDev

TECHNOLOGY COOPERATION AND CAPACITY BUILDING… Setting the Sceneindustry faces are numerous. Potentialimpacts include, among others: airemissions, climate change, biodiversity,marine and freshwater discharges,emergency preparedness in the event ofaccidents and oil spills, and soil andgroundwater contamination. The oil andgas industry has begun to respond tothese issues, however much remains tobe done. It should also be recognizedthat much has been achieved, and manyoil industry managements now placehigh priority on understanding andmanaging the environmental impact oftheir operations. The bibliography at theend of this report includes someexamples of guidelines and goodmanagement practices which have beenpublished to assist oil and gas industrymanagers in improving theirenvironmental performance.Industry is encouraged by anincreasing acceptance of the need toexplore new approaches toenvironmental management. It will bean active partner with governments injoint goal and standard settingexercises and it is strongly motivated toseek out and apply creative and costeffectiveapproaches to meeting newand challenging goals—outside thestrait jacket of simple end-of-pipetreatments and rigid command andcontrol strategies.The response to theseenvironmental challenges will differbetween companies and countries.Establishing new types of partnershipsand research programmes will be thekey to tackling these challenges. Forcontinued on page 8 …YORKTOWN: WORKING WITH PUBLIC POLICY ON GOAL SETTINGThe first approaches to environmentalregulations focused on control of pointsource emissions—smoke from chimneys,dirty water effluents and noisy machinery.This approach remained the preferred onefrom the 1960s to the early 1980s.Regulation in the United States, Europeand other parts of the world built on theconcept of point source emission controlwith increasing degrees of complexity andsophistication. The approach wasexpensive to implement and monitor, forboth industry and regulatory authorities.The cost effectiveness of this formof control was progressively challengedby industry and through scientificstudies which suggested that the fullanticipated environmental benefits werenot being realized because prescriptivelegislation minimized innovation andcost/benefit analysis.Faced with a further series of controlsat their Yorktown refinery (Virginia, USA),Amoco suggested to the USEnvironmental Protection Agency (EPA)that a cooperative study be made toexplore cheaper and moreenvironmentally-effective approaches tothe management of emissions (air, waterand wastes) from the refinery.The subsequent Yorktown Projectprepared a careful inventory of all sourcesof pollutants that required to be regulated.The inventory became the starting pointfor evaluating how ambient air quality,receiving water quality standards andwaste management requirements couldbest be met. The study proved effective inprioritizing sources of emissions based onthe effect their management would haveon meeting environmental quality goals. Italso highlighted the cost/benefit ofdirecting major efforts to control specific,prioritized sources as opposed to applyinguniform control standards on each andevery source.Comparing these two mechanisms,considerably less capital investment wasrequired to meet the environmentalobjectives by following the goal-settingrather than the latter prescriptiveapproach. While the EPA acknowledgesthe potential saving, regulation requiredAmoco to implement the moreexpensive solution. However, thisapproach represents a good example ofpartnership that ultimately will lead toachieving public policy objectives in amore cost-effective manner.6