The Sustainability Assessment Model (SAM)

Abstract

Abstract Business has a fundamental role to play in delivering Sustainable Development – the process needed to achieve a sustainable society. Sustainable Development is becoming an important issue for the oil and gas industry to address. There is, however, a lack of tools for improving decision making in this area. The paper outlines a tool (the Sustainability Assessment Model – SAM) which has been developed to assess whether or not a project can be said to be "sustainable". A project focus has been adopted in developing the tool because we believe that greater control over impacts can be achieved at this level. However, the tool can be used to aid specific design decisions (eg development scheme selection or concept selection) and also to assess an organisation's overall performance. The SAM assesses the social, environmental, economic and resource usage impacts of a project over its full life cycle. In the case of a hydrocarbon development this includes the design, construction, installation and commissioning of the facilities, the production of oil and gas and the eventual decommissioning of the facilities. This part of an oil and gas development is (usually) within the control of the operator. The SAM, however, extends the analysis beyond exploration and production and also assesses impacts from hydrocarbon refining, the manufacture of products and the eventual product use. It also addresses the possibility of remediation and restoration options. The SAM monetises all the impacts so that they can be compared on a like-for-like basis. This also allows the impacts to be combined into a single measure (which we have called the SAMi, or Sustainability Assessment Model indicator) which reflects overall whether a project is "sustainable" or not.