Chapter 1 - Introduction to Sustainability and Life Cycle

1.01 Intro to Sustainability & Life Cycle - Part 1 (14 min.) Sample Lesson
1.02 Intro to Sustainability & Life Cycle - Part 2 (28 min.) Quiz: 1.02 Intro to Sustainability & Life Cycle - Part 2

Chapter 2 - Introduction to Life Cycle

2.01 Life Cycle Analysis (9 min.)
2.02 Seismic, Planning and Engineering (9 min.)
2.03 Drilling and Pipelines (7 min.)
2.04 Operations (12 min.) Quiz: 2.04 Operations

Chapter 3 - Life Cycle Liability Management

3.01 Emergency Response & Contamination (17 min.)
3.02 Prevention & End of Life Considerations (13 min.)
3.03 End of Life Considerations cont'd (13 min.)
3.04 Remediation & Reclamation (13 min.)
3.05 Closure (4 min.) Quiz: 3.05 Closure

Chapter 4 - Asset Retirement Obligation

4.02 Environmental (8 min.)
4.01 Concept of an ARO (9 min.)
4.03 Auditors & Regulations (8 min.) Quiz: 4.03 Auditors & Regulations

Introduction to Sustainability and Life Cycle / Chapter 1 - Introduction to Sustainability and Life Cycle

Lesson 1.01 Intro to Sustainability & Life Cycle - Part 1

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Transcript

01. Lesson 1.01: Intro to Sustainability & Life Cycle - Part 1 02. Learning Goals 03. Definitions 04. Sustainable Development 05. Origins of sustainable development...06. Step back into time...07. Apollo 8 Earthrise - NASA - 1968 08. Anthropogenic disasters 09. Rise of activism 10. United Nations 11. United Nations - 2 12. Our Common Future 13. A more personal definition of sustainable development 14. United Nations - 3

01. Lesson 1.01: Intro to Sustainability & Life Cycle - Part 1

Welcome to Introduction to Sustainability and Life Cycle. Today, we're going to just introduce some of the terminology that we are going through. Environment can have its own unique terms, even things like ARO. What does ARO mean? Asset Retirement Obligation. So we're going to try to introduce them. But with sustainability, we're also going to step back and try and come up with where it came from because it's an interesting journey and it helps put some of these things into context. So that's what we're going to do over the next little while.

02. Learning Goals

In particular, we're going to give you some definitions and where those came from. And we're going to come up with a word called environmental aspects. It's a word I've often struggled with, but we're going to try and put some definitions to it. And what does that mean? We'll talk a little bit about climate change and carbon budgets, really just an introduction. Climate change is its own topic on its own. And we're going to end with the benefits of prevention. Prevention is, in my view, the cheapest way to go. If you don't have to clean something up, that's a good site.

03. Definitions

As in any technical field, there are lots of technical words suite. I don't know whether we do it to sort of promote ourselves and have this little language that we talk about, but we do have them. But in the environmental world, some of those have leaked into the public sphere and sustainability is one of those words. But if we look into well completions, the word frac'ing has gone into the public world as well. But does the public really know what frac'ing means? Do we really know what sustainability means? Well, I'm not going to try and define frac'ing, but I am going to try and come up with what sustainability means. And so we're going to start with the basics and see where that came from.

04. Sustainable Development

So the formal definition for sustainability: a sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. And this is from a document called Our Common Future. We're going to come back to this. But this is the official sort of touchstone of the definition of sustainability. When I'm teaching this in a class, I like students to think about what it means to them. But let's try to develop it a little bit of where it came from and why today we're talking about sustainable development.

05. Origins of sustainable development...

It wasn't an overnight advertising scheme. Don Draper didn't sit in his New York penthouse thinking about what can I do to sell another product. It's evolved over 40 - 50 years of increasing environmental awareness by the population of the world at large. And it's sort of been at the same time that our public communications ability has skyrocketed. So 100 years ago, how did we get news? We got it from the newspaper. It was probably a day or two old when we got it, but today it sort of instantaneously pops up as a note from one of our feeds on our desktops. So today, instantaneously, we know big things that happen around the world. And so we're going to start to see some of that happening with the environmental world as well.Carson, Rachel. "Silent Spring"

06. Step back into time...

So I always like to step back to 1962. A book by Rachel Carson was published. It was called "Silent Spring". She wrote it about the death of songbirds from DDT spraying. DDT was used to control mosquitoes, other pests, and it was widely used in North America as well as other places. But what she wrote about was that the songbirds were being affected by the spraying of DDT. I've also written a book too. It's about environmental regulations in Canada. And two people have read that. Unlike mine, lots of people read Rachel Carson's book. It was very well written. It was very easy to access and very easy for people to suddenly understand that there was an implication of spraying. DDT was banned in Canada and the USA in 1972. And you can see between here, there's this 10 year time lag between '62 when it first became known what the issue was to '72 when action was taken on it. Many people believed Silent Spring was the start of the environmental awareness movement.Silent Spring Paperback – Illustrated, Feb. 1 2022, Rachel Carson

07. Apollo 8 Earthrise - NASA - 1968

This isn't a classic one, but I believe it is so. As a child of the 60s, I grew up watching the space race. I remember watching them land on the moon. But this particular photo got widely spread, and including postage stamps. And it showed the planet in its beauty. And I think you can't help the raise awareness by something as simple as a photograph.

08. Anthropogenic disasters

We did start to see some anthropogenic disasters. Perhaps the third biggest oil spill in North America was Santa Barbara in 1969, and it was an offshore oil spill that spilled oil onto the beaches of Santa Barbara. We happened to be there in 2018 and we were walking along the beach and we came back to our hotel and we found black goo on our feet thinking, What's this? And had never really understood that there was an oil spill there, but there's still residue that's sweeping up today. We just were on Earth Day this past weekend, and Earth Day was formed after the Santa Barbara spill. So again, awareness starting to build.
Bohpal in '84, over 3,000 people instantly died when the plant blew up and another 16,000 died from the after effects. And this caused ripple effects through the chemical industry of how can we do better? Similarly, in Mexico, there was an explosion of propane and butane in a plant and 600 people there died. And an interesting thing from these two events in 1984 was being a junior design engineer at the time in a refinery, although they were a long way away, they were really close to home because it makes you think about process safety.
We had then Chernobyl in 1986 and probably that it's more ingrained into people's memories because the after effects are still with us, the exclusion zones still exist. And these are world wide events that everybody knows about. So it starts to raise environmental awareness.

09. Rise of activism

We saw then too, the rise of activism. We saw in Greenpeace in 1971 started and their issue was nuclear testing. And as a reminder that countries were still testing nuclear bombs in the air and underground. And now today, we think about that and say that can't have been good. And Greenpeace was one of the first to start protesting that very publicly.
Sea Shepherd came along in 1977 and their issue was whales. And if anybody hasn't heard of it, save the whales. That was the origin of them. Sea Shepherd was a little bit more violent than Greenpeace. Sea Shepherd would actually ram into ships. Greenpeace liked to hang banners.
The International Institute for Sustainable Development was established in 1990. Perhaps more of a think tank than activism, but they started to bring ideas about sustainability to governments and businesses.
There are also many local activism groups. In Alberta, one of our environmental ministers joked one day that he had many friends because there was the friends of the Old Man River at the time, and he had many other friends of certain issues, and these were local groups that were starting to raise awareness about environmental issues.

10. United Nations

So with this interesting worldwide awareness of environmental issues, awareness of things that can go wrong or go bump in the night. The United Nations was looking at that. The United Nations has this mission to do peace, dignity, and equality on a healthy planet. Hmm, that seems to cover environmental issues. And so the United Nations looked at that and thought that that was perhaps within their purview.
Environmental issues, now we can see from these things clearly cross country boundaries. They cross state lines, they cross province lines. This is just not a local issue, environmental issues are global in nature.

11. United Nations - 2

So they commissioned a report, Our Common Future. And if you remember, this is where we got the definition for sustainable development from. It was also known as the Brundtland Commission, and this was because the chair of the commission was Gro Brundtland, and she was the former prime minister of Norway. And she wrote a fairly detailed report, well, with a team of people.

12. Our Common Future

So what did they find in Our Common Future? Well, they found an enormous poverty in the southern hemisphere. So we had this inequality between the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere. We found in the northern hemisphere there was large consumption of resources and materials, and it was an inequitable consumption compared to the South. And as a result, the report recommended sustainable practices. So this comes back to starting to think about it's maybe not just about future generations, but about generations that live elsewhere on the planet. This report was presented to the General Assembly of the United Nations and the United Nations voted to continue this work. And they said OK, we need to continue going down this road.

13. A more personal definition of sustainable development

As I said at the beginning, I think it's important to come up with a personal definition of sustainable development and so this is mine. But I think everybody should try and come up with what it means for them. Sustainable development today is about development today, that does not screw your grandchildren out of a future that is as good as yours. You want them to have the same benefits that you have. It'll look different, but it should be as good.

14. United Nations - 3

So the United Nations followed on. One of the issues that had been identified had been the hole in the ozone layer, and it had been identified that ozone depleting chemicals like CFCs from our air conditioners were causing this hole. And in 1987, the United Nations sponsored the Montreal Protocol, and this was an international agreement to reduce ozone depleting chemicals. The hole has started to heal, but it's now, what, 30 years later. But in terms of an international conference, this one has been wildly successful. People actually did things. People actually reduce the amount of ozone depleting chemicals. They switched to less damaging chemicals and there's been a steady decline in the damage done by the chemicals that we use in our air conditioners. It is the success that we often refer to when we're looking at international agreements.
In 1992, the UN sponsored the Rio Earth Summit and it asks really, what kind of actions can we take on sustainable development? What can we do that's positive and concrete? And as an aside on this one, at the time I was working for a large company and our chairman decided he wanted to go to Rio. And so he decided that the director of Environment, Health and Safety should provide him briefing notes, who decided then that I should be working on those notes. So it's an interesting thing that in 1992 I got to write about sustainable development. I got to write a lot about what was going on and what the conference was going to be, and it was a very interesting time. I didn't get to go, but I got the T-shirt and I actually still have that Rio Earth Summit T-shirt.
It continued the conversation. And in 1997, we see the UN sponsors the Kyoto Protocol, of course, for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol set targets for every individual country. It was based on their abilities to reduce emissions but it was the opposite of the Montreal Protocol. It was a flop. Governments backed away from their commitments. Emissions actually increased rather than decreased. And so while the Montreal Protocol was wildly successful, Kyoto was not.
So that's the end of this lesson. We're going to continue this talk and we'll come back to you in the next lesson. Thanks.
Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: Our Common Future