Environmental Management
In 2005, we made measurable progress on each of the three strategic priorities for environmental performance established in 2004 and outlined in last year's Corporate Responsibility Report. These priorities are: defining world-class standards, measuring and communicating performance and demonstrating continual performance improvement.
Progress on these priorities, described below, reflects disciplined application of our Operational Excellence Management System (OEMS), which also encompasses efficiency, natural resources conservation, product stewardship and emergency management.
OEMS Meets International Standards
To confirm that OEMS is aligned with international standards, we asked Lloyd's Register Quality Assurance to review OEMS. LRQA attested that OEMS design fully addresses, and in some respects exceeds, the requirements of ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001. See the full text of the statement elsewhere on our Web site (PDF, 241 Kb). As part of the review, in late 2005 we made our Operational Excellence policy publicly available on our Web site.
At the operating organization level, our international upstream organization, which represents most of Chevron's significant new project growth, approved a significant new standardized process for identifying and addressing the environmental, social and health impact of major capital projects.
Measuring and Communicating Performance
During 2005, we developed internal metrics for companywide tracking of key water and waste performance. We will begin gathering and assessing companywide data in these areas in 2006. These steps reflect our commitment to continual improvement in environmental performance and in measuring and communicating results. We also are working to fully integrate data from former Unocal operations and update our targets to reflect our changing portfolio of operations.
OEMS Leads to Improvement
In 2005, we met our goals for energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions. We had no spills from our operated fleet of tankers. Excluding hurricane-related spills, oil spill performance matched our 2004 performance. As discussed in our case study, describing Chevron's response to the U.S. Gulf Coast hurricanes, we plan for emergencies such as hurricanes. We believe that our extensive emergency preparedness and response efforts, as well as prior investments in subsea well-shutoff capabilities, significantly minimized environmental releases during the 2005 hurricane season. We continue to learn important lessons from such events and build those into future preparedness plans.
This report summarizes our performance in key areas including air emissions and petroleum spills. Environmental fines and settlements are also described. Regarding chemical spills, we had 35 such accidental releases in 2005, with a total volume of 178,000 kilograms, less volume than in 2004. A total of 70,200 kilograms of chemicals were recovered, and the remaining chemicals were contained and disposed of properly. Chemical spills encompass accidental releases of all nonpetroleum materials, which include drilling fluids, contaminated water and other chemicals, such as those used as catalysts.
