Environmental Sustainability Assessment and Impact Analysis

Introduction

With the worlds increased demand for energy for fuelling increased prosperity and provision of people with better lives, demands for delivery of energy in new sustainable ways comes up. These sustainable ways are characterised by low emissions. This report will do an evaluation of the current sustainability performance of BP and seek to establish how the company impacts the environment. Along this report research data will be evaluated and examined in a form of tables and spreadsheets. Recommendations will be given for BP’s sustainability performance in their environmental aspect. offers the most valuable insights for those who are seeking environmental studies dissertation help.

Methodology

Different types of data will be collected to show how companies like BP’s maintain its sustainability performance. This report will conduct a qualitative relevant research through gathering secondary data from academic articles, newspapers and books. In addition, data will be represented in a visualization charts created from a specified program known as Tableau. This is in order to come up with viable findings and recommendations.

Furthermore, there are hashtags term searches being collected from social media platform (Twitter). Twitter has been used in order to support the collection, analysation and presenting of large data set. Which are all highly transferable to other platforms and topics.

Company Overview:

BP is one of the leading petroleum company`s in Britain whose area of specialty is in the provision of gas and oil in the whole of the United Kingdom. It`s industry areas include; exploration of oil and gas, marketing and refining, the supply of petroleum products, chemical manufacture and marketing, generation of Gas and Power and Photovoltaic cells manufacture. Competitors of British Petroleum include; Exxon-Mobil and Shell (Alazzani and wan hussin, 2013). Across the globe, BP ranks among the top three gas and oil producers with vast operations in Europe, Africa, Australia, Asia and America. Up to 70% of the profits of the company are generated in Europe and the US and the company has been pressing on with new operations of exploration and production in the Caspian Sea, Africa, Asia and South America (Corporate Watch, 2016).

Environmental Sustainability Performance:

BP has developed a “reduce, improve and create” framework that focuses the entire operations of the company on the reduction of emissions, improvement of their products and creation of businesses that are characteristically low in carbon. The company has backed up the framework with targets that are clear and has been observed to make very good progress since last year. Bob Dudley the group chief executive firmly believes that the company`s strategy is consistent with the Paris agreements` climate goals (BP Sustainability Report 2018, 2019).

Figure 1: BP`s emissions performance adapted from the BP Sustainability Report 2018.

Figure 2: BP`s Greenhouse gas emissions adapted from the BP Sustainability Report 2018

Critical analysis of British Petroleum carbon reduction trends

The global portfolio of BP`s products includes lubricants and fuels that aid the improvement of energy efficiency and further help with the reduction of emissions and the company has been on an offensive to increase the range of options they offer (BP Sustainability Report 2018, 2019). For instance, they supply their airline customers with BP bio jet in different markets. Bio jet is made using cooking oil that has been recycled which is blended with conventional jet fuel. That goes a long way in cutting greenhouse gas emissions by up to 60% in comparison to conventional jet fuel. Tom Pasons, the commercial development manager of Biojet believes that by 2050, there will be a low likelihood of electric engines applying significant roles in commercial aviation. As such, the biggest impact on emissions can be drawn from the use of fuels that are sustainable in conventional aircraft. The company has also, for the past 13 years been helping its consumers to take action on their emissions through their programme of offsetting carbon (bp, 2019). Up to date, they have been able to create about twenty different products that are carbon neutral and services across the automotive, transport, commercial and aviation industries.

The management of BP holds the belief that properly designed carbon pricing provides everyone with an incentive to participate in the reduction of emissions, including energy producers and even the consumers. That goes a long way in increasing the attractiveness of energy efficiency and makes low carbon solutions, like carbon capture and renewables, use and storage even more competitive. Today, carbon pricing systems cover up to one fifth of the greenhouse gas emissions of the world. In all evaluations of plans for different projects, BP utilises carbon prices. The price currently stands at $40 for every CO2 tonne, with a stress test at a carbon price of $80 for every tonne (Steve, 2013). These specific prices have been in use in the industrialised countries but have since expanded to be applicable everywhere in the world. BP has engaged different makers of policies in Europe in relation to the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and in China, Canada and Australia.

It is worth noting that while the company supports carbon pricing that is properly designed, they are also, always prepared to oppose proposals that have poor designs. They opposed the ballot initiative proposal that sought to introduce in Washington, a carbon fee back in 2018. The economy of Washington would have been harmed by the policy`s poor design and carbon emissions would not even have been reduced. The proposal`s terms exempted six of the state`s biggest pollutants and effectively subsidised some of the companies at the expense of other companies (bp, 2018).

BP has also been using different fuel types and materials in dealing with the quality of local air and also in improving air emissions. Their 2018 sustainability report stated that in the course of their unconventional gas operations, they make use of fuels that are low in sulphur for drilling and hydraulic simulation equipment (BP Sustainability Report 2018, 2019). That goes a long way in reducing emission of sulphur dioxide which is not good for the environment. In their sustainability report, BP has made a declaration that they made use of up to six different types of liquefied gas that carried with enhancement that was energy efficient. They end up using up to 25% less fuel and also produce reduced amounts of nitrogen oxide.

Recommendations for improvement

BP should work to ensure they operate in ways that are ethical and to ensure that all their operations are ethical. According to their 2018, sustainability report, it is clear that the company is committed to carrying out its businesses in ways that are ethical and transparent, making use of their code of conduct and values to guide them. More should be done.

That could be achieved through training that is effective and that ensures that they apply their code of conduct and also abide to it with set expectations on how to go about with working in the said companies and whether there are breaches to codes of conduct, the appropriate actions that would be taken to resolve them. The focus of their training should be on improvement of workplace awareness, dealing with conflicts and harassment and also protecting information that is sensitive within the company.

Conclusion

While there is still more that could be done, it is worth noting that BO has been performing quite well in its objectives of reducing emissions. The company has been observed to work hard to comprehend social and environmental sensitivities in those areas where they operate which is done with the aim of avoidance, minimisation and mitigation of any potential impacts. To continuously improve the ways through which the company manages its potential impacts and environmental performance, the company has also been seen to integrate the ISO 14001 environmental management standards into its Operating Management System which is quite commendable.

Introduction

This section does an analysis of different findings derived from twitter. We sought to establish the ways through which British Petroleum Plc. has been performing in terms of its initiatives of reducing the carbon emissions from its operations. All our data is derived from twitter.

Methodology

Tags, a free template from Google Sheets was used to facilitate the setting up of automated collections of twitter search results and also their running. TAGS automatically puts together into a Google spreadsheet the results drawn from a twitter search. We used TAGS v6.0 which includes a twitter connection experience that is streamlined and also includes new support site.

Presentation of results

On Twitter, in every second, there are up to 6,000 tweets that are tweeted. That corresponds to 350,000 tweets in every minute, in a day 500 million tweets and in a year, around 2000 tweets. When one is well aware of the meaning of a statistic graph, they are able to work out the most appropriate working conditions for any activities. From our results, there were up to 3135 tweets that were related to the issue of sustainability and out of these there were three thousand one hundred and twenty six tweets that touched on specific issues of sustainability. It is worth noting that on twitter, not all seconds are the same, and that is, all seconds are not equal. While on average second daily, there are up to 6,000 tweets tweeted, on August 3, 2013 in a single second that broke all records, there were 143,199 tweets which was up to twenty times the average. This happened as Japanese people viewed and tweeted about Castle in the Sky an animated movie that was airing on TV. Recently, Twitter agreed to providing the largest global library with all public tweets that have ever been sent and to continuously supply the tweets to the archive of the library continuously.

Figure 3: Number of tweets statistics

The data that was drawn from twitter here included the environmental reporting performance of British Petroleum, its reports of adherence to standards of environmental reporting like the Global Reporting Initiative, compliance with investors and also reports on compliance with the requests of stakeholders for purposes of transparency. The subcategory of Environmental Policy and Reporting includes the policies of a company together with the intentions of reducing the company`s impact on the environment and its value stream to healthy levels for the company and also healthy for the environment, today and even in the future.

Conclusion

From the data collected here, it is evident that British petroleum has been putting some meaningful efforts in ensuring that it addresses climate change. They achieve that through the formulation of appropriate strategies and policies, operations that are energy efficient and renewable energy development together with the development of any other technologies that can be used as alternatives, the disclosure of environmental risk and liability sources, implementation of programs of conservation of natural resources and efficiency, the demonstration of strategies of sustainable development, the integration of activities of management with environmental sustainability and the development of programs that are capable of engaging stakeholders for the environments improvement.

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References

Alazzani, A. and wan hussin, w. (2013). Global Reporting Initiative's environmental reporting: A study of oil and gas companies. Ecological Indicators. [online] Available at:

BP Sustainability Report 2018. (2019). [ebook] British Petroleum. Available at: https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/sustainability/group-reports/bp-sustainability-report-2018.pdf [Accessed 16 Dec. 2019].

bp. (2019). ENVIRONMENT. [online] Available at: https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/sustainability/environment.html [Accessed 16 Dec. 2019].

Corporate Watch. (2016). BP Plc Company Profile. [online] Available at: https://corporatewatch.org/bp-plc-company-profile/ [Accessed 16 Dec. 2019].

Steve, P. (2013). BP's sustainability strategy: capturing returns from first-mover advantage. American Journal of Business. [online] Available at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/AJB-08-2013-0057/full/html [Accessed 16 Dec. 2019].