Environmental Report 1999 Index

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Our vision In conjunction with its member companies, UKOOA strives to build a UK oil and gas industry that will be sustainable and competitive through the next century, and that works to the benefit of all its stakeholders. Our environmental principles The UK oil and gas industry does not operate in isolation. It is a fully participative member of our complex industrial society, and as such it is subject both to the law of supply and demand and to the law of the land. In fact, our members operate under more than 200 different sets of regulations that change from time to time to reflect new technology or new public concerns. Following discussions with the Department of the Environment, Transport and Regions (DETR) and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), UKOOA has established a set of principles that it will use to work with the Government as it establishes future regulatory regimes. These principles are: continual improvement of the Industry's offshore environmental performance should be guided, as far as is practicable, by long term goal setting, considering all emission streams holistically; methods for achieving environmental goals should be flexible, appropriate to the asset life cycle, and promote innovation rather than relying on compliance against prescriptive standards or technologies; sound scientific analysis should be applied to assess environmental risk and impact. However, where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty will not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation; in all cases agreed improvements should recognise the balance between benefit gained and cost incurred, as well as the balance between emission stream tradeoffs; the process of developing environmental regulations should be transparent and include stakeholder consultation; penalties should apply if environmental laws are broken.