Environmental management means that we conduct our business with regard to the way it affects or could affect the environment.
The ISO 14001 environmental standard is observed, and energy management will be adopted on all our offshore installations in 2008.
Operations on the NCS cause both discharges to the sea and emissions to the air. It is important to know how these discharges/emissions affect the environment, so that we can take measures both to prevent unnecessary impacts and to minimise those which do occur.
The international ISO 14001 standard describes how we can pursue good and systematic environmental management. To comply with this norm, we set ourselves environmental improvement targets every year.
We monitor our discharges continuously, and with regular intervals we check the seabed and water masses around the installations we operate. This is according to guidelines laid down by the Norwegian Pollution Control Authority (SFT). Systematic efforts are made to reduce discharges to the sea.
Daily samples are taken of discharge water to ensure that it does not contain undesirable pollutants and that we do not exceed the discharge requirements set both by ourselves and by the authorities.
The very low content of oil in discharge water from many of our installations indicates that we are constantly improving, so do the results from environmental monitoring around the installations. The only place where some of the pollutants we know we discharge today can be found is immediately around the platform columns. Discharge of oil based drilling fluid was prohibited in 1992, however traces can still be found at seabed.
Our systematic approach to discharges to the sea is now being extended to emissions to the air and energy consumption, with energy management being introduced on all fixed installations during 2008.
Daily monitoring of the way we produce and use energy on our installations can help us to become even more energy efficient, and thereby reduce emissions of both carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides.
