Explaining the Need for the ISO 14001 Certification in the Oil and Gas Sector

This article talks about the prominent environmental impacts of the oil and gas exploration sector and why the companies need the ISO 14001 standard.

The oil and gas sector operates globally in various countries and habitats. The sector is said to be highly impacting to the environment and its natural habitats, along with consuming all the natural reserves. The exploration of the reserves of oil or gas results in many harmful consequences such as oil spills, fire, land contamination, and water pollution. All these have immediate as well as long term effects on the ecological balance. In recent years, oil and gas corporations are working tirelessly to ensure environmental protection and management of impacts. The ISO 14001 certification, being an international accreditation for Environmental Management System (EMS), will help them to meet the challenge. Here, in this article, we provide you with some intricate details on the environmental management in the oil and gas sector.

Before we talk about the steps for environmental management, it is important that you know about the extensive impacts of oil and gas sectors.

• Atmospheric impacts: Emissions (carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide) from operations like flaring, purging of gases, combustion, venting, and fugitive gases during loading

• Aquatic impacts: Sewage, spills, leakages, drilling fluids, plant treatment chemicals, cooling water

• Terrestrial impacts: Solid waste disposal, leakage or spillages contamination, pollution of groundwater table, physical disturbance due to heavy constructions, and erosions

• Human/Living organism impacts: Danger of extinction of natural habitats of flora and fauna, migration of animals or birds, loss of forests, loss of habitats, dislocation of social communities.

• Calamities or emergencies: Spillage of fuels or toxic chemicals, explosions or blowouts of oil plants, implications of natural disasters on exploration operations, sabotage etc.

To deal with any kind of potentially harmful impacts, the EMS is necessary. ISO 14001 standard helps oil and gas companies to design and implement the best framework for EMS. It helps in preventing environmental impacts in the following ways.

Keyways the ISO 14001 Helps at Environmental Management in the Oil and Gas Sector

Encourages Management Commitment

Implementation of an ISO 14001 based EMS needs unwavering commitment by the senior management. They should work towards developing a set of objectives for environmental management, a policy, allocation of necessary resources, training employees, delegating responsibilities, and motivating them to participate.

Policy and Strategic Objectives

A crucial requirement of the EMS is that the oil and gas company should have a well-formulated policy and a predefined set of strategic objectives considering all their environmental impacts. The policy and objectives must be documented and communicated to everyone in the company.

Evaluation and Risk management

The EMS should provide specific procedures for the identification of risks and hazards which may arise from the gas or oil exploration operations of the company. Every operation from the start should be included within the scope of identification, i.e., from inception to storage and distribution. EIA (Environmental Impact Assessment) is the best way for assessing the risks which include well-defined steps such as deciding environmental baseline, identifying the risky or sensitive environments, identifying legislative and industrial requirements, incorporating risk assessment, analyzing the impacts of risks, quantifying the impacts, and developing contingency plans.

Environmental Training for the Employees

On implementation of the EMS, the company should foster awareness of environmental management in each of the employees. They should know the urgency to prevent the impacts through training. The training is necessary to ensure the environmental control procedures are followed by employees correctly.

Planning

The results of the evaluation of risks should lead to an effective planning process. It must include crucial steps like risk assessment, consultation, emergency response, waste control treatment, communication programs, compliance programs, specification of contractors’ obligations, decommissioning and detailed restoration.

Implementation and Monitoring

The steps and programs decided in the planning process must be well implemented by the company with the support of environmental consultants or a special team. While mostly, the responsibilities lie with the managers, it is recommended to take assistance from specialists to ensure the implementation of various steps and programs are accurate. Following the implementation, the company needs to designate staff for monitoring to ensure that all intended purposes are met and also to identify whether there are any unexpected outcomes.

Auditing and Review

The audit procedure is an integral part of the ISO 14001 EMS which helps to substantiate and verify every implemented program and measure. Other reasons to perform audits is to increase internal awareness, lead to continual improvement of environmental measures, and make the company’s environmental controls and procedures credible to everyone.

The oil and gas sector is perhaps one of the biggest contributors to environmental impacts. Hence, there is a need for some stringent measures and regulations to control the impacts and make the operations of gas or oil explorations less damaging. The ISO 14001 certification puts forth a set of best practices under the framework of EMS and so it is the most required tool for companies to control and manage their impacts.