Environmental, Societal and Economic Impacts and Sustainability of Refining & Petrochemical Manufacturing

This paper reviews the sustainability issues in the refining and petrochemical manufacturing industry. This industry depends on non-renewable inputs and uses lot of energy in processing crude oil into fuels and petrochemical products, and produces CO2 , a major Green House Gas (GHG) causing climate change. This industry handles a complex network of materials and energy. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) encourage public disclosures on sustainability performance . Tthis paper compares the sustainability performance indicators of  global oil & gas majors , from the publicly available data from GRI and CDP   and evaluates the effectiveness of the approaches  and strategies of these oil &gas majors . This comparison of  effectiveness of triple bottom-line approaches enumerated in this paper is expected to be of help in future planning of sustainability measures for the industry as a whole.