Oil Sands

The petroleum industry and its government regulators say they know a “social licence to operate” is necessary in today’s society, and they know what they need to do to secure it.

Unfortunately, they’re not doing it, or not doing it enough, some top minds from those sectors told colleagues at a major gathering in Houston today.

The public knows that “what really drives behaviour in an organization is values. We used to think it was the organization that did that,” said Jay Pryor, a VP of Chevron.

And while increasingly corporations and government have “got” that, they remain hidebound by practices that prevent people from seeing it for themselves.

“Fine photos and aspirational statements” litter social responsibility reports, said former Clinton Whitehouse staffer and US ambassador Philip Lader. That’s not communicating values to a skeptical public.

“You need specific metrics,” no less exacting than the “key performance indicators” that financial auditors demand. “We are almost speaking different languages,” Lader said. “Reporting of non-financial performance has lagged far behind” what the public today requires.

From a Government perspective, reporting that the public can access, assess and believe is not merely nice, it’s necessary, said Alberta Energy official David Morhart in the CERAWeek panel presentation, Oil and Gas Industry Stakeholders: “License to Operate”.

“Our accountability is to the people of our province, the people who own the resources,” Morhart said. “We are creating access to the information, and we need to do a lot more on that.”

Alberta is also developing sustainability criteria — those aforementioned “key performance indicators” — that can be third-party audited to demonstrate whether stated policies and goals are in fact being executed to achieve the stated goals, Morhart said.

- David Sands