Environmental management

As any other industrial activity, oil and gas operations affect the environment. The company understands its social responsibility for potential adverse effects of its operations and makes significant efforts to minimize the environmental impact as a whole and each of its components. The minimization methods include upgrading of production facilities to reduce emissions and discharges, pipeline replacement and inhibition to prevent oil spills, remediation of mechanically disturbed and oil-contaminated lands, associated petroleum gas utilization and many other environmental protection activities. As a result, our environmental performance improves each year, and we are consistent in eliminating our legacy contaminations.

The company managed to achieve the following results over the years of its existence:

• The level of associated petroleum gas utilization by TNK-BP reached 84.4% in 2009, which is nine percentage points above the level of 2004. As a result, overall atmospheric emissions of pollutants declined by 15% across the company over the same period. TNK-BP plans to gradually continue its work aimed to increase the level of associated petroleum gas utilization and bring it to 95% in all company assets in the medium term considering the macroeconomic situation.
• Along with growing production of oil and gas in TNK-BP fields and new field commissioning, the company water consumption level declined by 15% in 2009 compared with 2004. This is achieved due to our activities aimed to reduce in-process losses, upgrade treatment facilities and optimize water consumption as a whole. At the same time, the volume of recirculated water supply and successive repeated use of water increased by 32% across the company since 2004. In particular, our oil and gas production subsidiaries keep gradually reducing freshwater consumption to maintain reservoir pressure and use produced water for that purpose.
• New asset development causes increased generation of production waste. At the same time, our newly generated waste handling activities allowed reducing annual waste accumulation by 25% compared with 2004.
• The number of spills declined by 69% across the company compared with 2005 as a result of implementation of the TNK-BP Integrity Management Strategy. The company reconstructed 3,546 km of pipelines in 2004—09 with the key requirement for reconstruction being obligatory inner and outer protection against corrosion.
• Our program to remediate the environmental legacy (i.e. the lands that were contaminated due to economic activity of previous license area owners) resulted in full remediation of ca. 2,500 hectares of land and their handover to government commissions.
• Company investments in environmental protection activities increased by a factor of 7.6, from 375 mln rubles in 2004 to 2.8 bln rubles in 2009. The investments include expenditures for design, construction and repair of environmental protection facilities (e.g. waste landfills, effluent treatment works), funding of atmospheric air conservation programs (including flaring system reconstruction, arrangement or development of infrastructure to gather and utilize associated petroleum gas), expenditures to neutralize drilling waste of closed—loop well construction and dismantle decommissioned equipments (idle pipelines, old tanks, well abandonment, etc.).

Fig. 1—3 show the impacts of TNK-BP operations (by disciplines) on the environmental components.

Fig. 1. Overall atmospheric emission of pollutants

TNK-BP total atmospheric emissions of pollutants, '000 tons	Key TNK-BP discipline contribution to atmospheric emissions

APG utilization trend, %

Fig. 2. Water consumption, water discharge and reused water volume

TNK-BP water consumption, million m3	Water consumption by key TNK-BP disciplines
Water discharge, million m3	TNK-BP water discharge by key disciplines
Reused water volume, '000 m3	Key TNK-BP discipline contribution to water reuse

The concept of reused water implies the total of volumes of recirculated water supply and successive repeated water use.

Fig. 3. Production and consumption waste handling

Annual waste generation, '000 tons	TNK-BP waste generation by key disciplines
Annual waste utilization, '000 tons	TNK-BP waste utilization by key disciplines

Fig. 4. Environmental protection investments

Environmental protection investments, million rubles