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Sustainable Development
23/01/2012
Every industry, be it Retail, Leisure or Oil and Gas want to develop business for the future. This is as much about ensuring good returns for stakeholders as it is about securing future market and resource share. Sustainable development is not about getting to the finish line first, or doing so without integrity, it is about ensuring that your development as a company and as an industry is congruent to the needs of the environment, of individuals and of society. This being so, how can the Oil and Gas engineers help develop the industry in the coming decades?
Balancing doing the right thing with the obligation of ensuring that a company remains profitable is not an easy thing to do. However, by committing to sustainable development a company can feasibly enhance their reputation by demonstrating how they have mitigated risk. This enhanced reputation will in turn build profits. When it comes to the environment this is happening already. Oil and Gas engineers are looking for the next technology to provide a secure supply of energy to customers. By looking outside their traditional sources of energy - hydrocarbons and fossil fuels - they are enhancing reputation and thus are likely to get more shareholder investment.
Individuals in the West already need the resources from the Oil and Gas Industry to sustain their current lifestyle. As individuals in developing countries increase their energy consumption so the current processes for sustainable development will be tested. Any future development plans have to take into account the ever expanding base of individual consumers. Estimates or plans built on the current volume of consumption are inherently flawed. There is no magic solution that will see the sources that we current rely on replaced but a good sustainable development plan will take into account future need and future sources.
As society, in both developed and developing countries, becomes aware of environmental issues further pressure is put on Oil and Gas engineers to come up with plans for growth that contain provisions for less emissions and less harmful gases in the atmosphere. There is a misguided belief that the end of oil, and the rise of environmental issues, somehow means the end of the Oil and Gas industry. This is far from true. Those who innovate now will be the standard bearers of a new energy age where supply will be mixed between sustainable sources and the traditional hydrocarbon sources.
The Oil industry does not end with oil. Developing a sustainable development plan will help not only the industry and individual companies survive but it will help very much with energy security going forward. Oil and Gas engineers, as always, are at the centre of this leading the search for new technologies and developing them for future use.
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