Building sustainable models and assessments into petroleum companies: theory and application

Abstract

There is an urgent need to build sustainable models to predict future in oil and gas sector to accommodate and respond to the short-term pressures. One of the main issues in petroleum companies is the concept of sustainability interpreted in a multitude of different ways. Numerous frameworks have been presented to assess sustainability, but there is no agreement on a common set of criteria for analysis, investigation, modelling and assessment. A framework of sustainability in oil and gas industry was built and investigated on two important levels: micro-level and macro-level. The micro-level was proposed to evaluate sustainable index in an individual petroleum company and macro-level was suggested to assess sustainable index in the whole oil and gas sector. Practical indicators have been suggested, developed and evaluated to assess sustainability indexes. An implementation of the suggested framework was applied through three big petroleum companies in Sultanate of Oman. The results show that some companies had sustainable indices of more importance than others.