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Safety and Integrity
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Alarm Management
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Process Engineering
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Remote Monitoring
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Hydrocarbon Accounting
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Pipeline Leak Detection
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Production Data Management
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Environmental Monitoring
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Environmental Monitoring The oil and gas industry recognises the need to monitor environmental emissions, and is committed to meeting targets that limit and reduce waste and pollution.
We believe that relating the available data to key impact factors provides a clearer understanding of the existing conditions and enables a more targeted approach to improvements.
Benchmarking is a term for industry internal comparative assessment, and is becoming increasingly popular as a management tool because it approaches the above high-level target from differing perspectives. It relates the environmental performance of companies that all experience the same environmental and political pressures. This highlights areas of strengths and weaknesses, giving operators a starting point for prioritisation and further action.
 The Environmental Emissions Monitoring System (EEMS), in conjunction with other data sources, contains a vast amount of data, which is available for analysis. We have developed an Environmental Benchmarking Tool (EBT), in conjunction with environmental specialists TINA Consultants Ltd, which provides environmental managers and advisors with easy access to the data. EBT allows operators to benchmark a range of environmental performance indicators, including emissions to air and water, oil spills, drill cuttings and waste management. There are currently 15 different benchmark categories defined. The tool contains historical data back to 1997.
EBT allows information to be compared by operator or installation, and can filter on oil and gas installations. EBT displays the information in appropriate graphical or textual format – bar charts, bell curves, and optionally displays the underlying data values and ranking of the operators.
The content of the published EEMS data changes from year to year, so EBT has been designed to provide maximum flexibility when importing this data, and can cope with all of these changes. The system can also handle any mergers / takeovers at installation and operator level – historical data can be re-assigned to allow sensible comparisons with the newest organisational structures.
 BUSINESS DRIVERS: Environmental Benchmarking enables operators to:
- Assess significance: how significant are the emissions or discharges in comparison to similar operations?
- Identify areas for improvement: if certain emissions or discharges are relatively high, then it may be technically feasible to reduce these;
- Justify performance: if certain emissions or discharges are relatively low then this would make their reduction less of a priority;
- Set performance targets: it would make sense to set reduction targets in line with what is being achieved elsewhere;
- Data quality: anomalies in the underlying data are visible, enabling data to be validated and subsequent quality improved.
BUSINESS BENEFITS: EBT enables operators to:
- Easily summarise environmental factors to provide reports;
- Annual data can be imported and interpreted quickly and easily;
- Interpret environmental data in additional ways;
- New types of data or benchmarking categories are easily configured;
- New assets can easily be added;
- Mergers and sell-offs can be easily configured;
- Historical information is available, allowing trends to be identified.
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