The world awakening to the environmental hazards of industrial development is realized nowhere more than in the energy industries, and particularly in the petroleum industry. Because of the all-pervasive scope of environmental considerations in industrial activities, it is essential to include environmental planning from their inception, through all stages of development and operations, to the final depletion and restoration phase. This process is costly, it requires new technologies and it is of great political significance. It must involve everyone who is actively engaged in petroleum development. The petroleum industry has established environmental policies and developed organizational structures and procedures to ensure that these policies are effectively administered. However, it is still not fully realized that environmental management must flow from the board room through every division, department and group in the industrial organization to those on the front lines of industrial activity. Environmental management must also become part and parcel of the economic, political and technical aspects of industrial projects from initial conception to final operation. All too often it is assumed that the segment of industry specifically concerned with environmental conservation will manageenvironmental aspects and that the other segments need not be too concerned except as specifically directed. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that close integration of environmental management is essential in all phases of petroleum development.
The technological advances of the postindustrial civilizations have created two conditions which have presented major problems of environmental concern:
Increased productivity has filled man's basic needs so that his concerns are now directed to quality of life on a more sophisticated plane.
Increased productivity has also increased "byproductivity" of undesirable pollutants to such an extent as to cause concern for the absorptive capacity of the air, water and land to receive them.
Thus in recent years we have experienced new concern for the environmental aspects of all industrial development and more especially those developments having major effects on the environment. This particularly applies to resource developments such as strip mining, water impoundments linear projects (such as highways, pipelines, etc.), and industrial project sites.
Environmental concern has translated itself into a whole new era of environmental planning (or all industrial development. Environmental impact statements are now essential prior to, during, and subsequent to industrial development. A whole new era complex system of governmental assessments, public hearings, regulations, and monitoring requirements now controls industrial activity, whereas a short few years ago governments were chiefly concerned with health aspects of the industrial environment now the governments have vast environment departments to regulate all environmental aspects of industrial development.
As a natural outcome of the public and resultant government, environmental concern, industrial corporations now find it a requirement to include in their corporate organizational structures adequate provision for controlling the environmental aspects of their operations. This applies from inception of a project, through governmental applications, on to construction stages and hence to operational phases.
