Water is vital to all life. It is essential to the maintenance of ecosystems and to the earth's environmental balance.
Our complete dependence on water makes it a unique and critical resource. There are no substitutes. The United Nations states that 1.1 billion people, or 18% of the world's population, currently lack access to a clean water supply.
Water is an integral part of petroleum industry processes. Exploration, production, refining and manufacturing of petroleum products all produce and interact with vast quantities of water. The environmental implications are significant.
It is a major challenge for the industry to maintain production and ensure supplies of energy for an expanding world economy, while protecting the water resources and the ecosystems that they sustain.
Implementing sustainable water resource management as a principle in all our operations is StatoilHydro's answer to this challenge.
The three water-related problems - scarcity, inundation and pollution - will all probably be intensified by climate change. Important sectors, including power production, agriculture and tourism, will be affected. Adaptation to new climate conditions will largely be related to the management of freshwater resources.
The increased demand for biofuels as a low carbon, but water-consuming, energy source makes the supply balance for food, energy and ecosystems an even bigger challenge. By conducting thorough sustainability analyses, we will ensure that we have sufficient knowledge about the effects of increased dependence on bioenergy on water and land use at the local, regional and global level and we will attempt to minimise such effects.
We aim to increase our water efficiency, minimise pollution and work actively to improve the water situation in communities in which we are located. These will be important contributions to sustainable water resource management.
