Toward a Sustainable Decommissioning of Offshore Platforms in the Oil and Gas Industry: A PESTLE Analysis

Nunzia Capobianco,Francesca Loia,Roberto Vona,Vincenzo Basile

doi:10.3390/su13116266

Nunzia Capobianco, Francesca Loia + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/su13116266

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Journal: Sustainability	Publication Date: Jun 1, 2021
Citations: 25	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Naples Federico II

Abstract

The growing complexity of environmental challenges has progressively led to the emergence of Sustainable Business Models (SBMs) able to embed economic, environmental, and social flows in a unified value network. All sectors are demanding innovative and sustainable solutions, including the oil and gas industry, which aims to address the issues about the decommissioning of offshore platforms. However, although the relevant literature highlighted the potentialities related to a multi-reuse of these structures, the effect of Sustainable Decommissioning (SD) on macro-environmental factors is still an open question. Based on these considerations, this study follows a Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental (PESTLE) analysis according to semi-structured interviews conducted with oil and gas key informants and stakeholders in the Italian context. The results of the analysis can provide a novel thinking for addressing the challenges related to a sustainable decommissioning of offshore platforms and shed light on the importance of synergistic efforts by local entrepreneurship and institutional arrangements to combine economic and environmental sustainability with social needs. This paper can contribute to the emerging field of sustainable business models related to the decommissioning of offshore platforms and suggests avenues for future research.

Highlights

Countries, organizations, and citizens have been called to pursue in the coming decades the 17 macro-objectives— called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—defined by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 September 2015
To investigate the influence of the Sustainable Decommissioning (SD) of offshore platforms on macro-environmental parameters, this study aims to carry out a PESTLE analysis
According to the data analyzed, the PESTLE criteria are focused on potentialities and issues related to the political, economic, socio-cultural, technological, legal, and environmental considerations on the sustainable decommissioning of offshore platforms in the Italian context

Summary

Introduction

Organizations, and citizens have been called to pursue in the coming decades the 17 macro-objectives— called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—defined by the United Nations General Assembly on 25 September 2015. There is a growing awareness in the business context of the relevance of sustainability issues and the need to meet the challenge of sustainable development to face increasingly thoughtful environmental and social concerns For this reason, over the past 10 years, the topic of a Sustainable Business Model (SBM) has become the subject of increasing attention and has grown rapidly in the literature and in several industries, driving companies and scholars to explore new entrepreneurial opportunities for improving the impact of the organizations on the three pillars of sustainability—profit, people, and planet [2,3,4,5,6]. In the oil and gas industry, innovative solutions are demanding the inclusion in competitive strategies of sustainable business

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