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The business case for sustainable development

Contributing to sustainable development supports our More Upstream, Profitable Downstream business strategy. It helps create business value and reduce operational and financial risk, making us a more competitive and profitable company.

We see no trade-off between being economically responsible (profitable) and socially and environmentally responsible. Instead, being a socially and environmentally responsible company contributes to our being a profitable company by helping us:

Earn our licence to operate and grow

By listening to the communities in which we work and addressing their expectations we significantly reduce the chance of project delays, approval failures or disruption to existing operations. These are significant risks to our business. Contributing to sustainable development also helps us attract and retain staff, customers and business partners who are central to our business success and future growth.

Develop the right products

By being aware of emerging changes to our customers’ values and changes in regulatory requirements, we can develop products and services before competitors that meet our customers’ needs for clean, convenient and affordable energy.

Maximise opportunities

By adopting new or cleaner technologies we can improve the efficiency of our operations, reduce costs, avoid current and future costs of emissions, and even create new income streams (like carbon credits).

In short, we have learned – sometimes the hard way – that applying a sustainable development mindset is not only the right thing to do, but it is also the smart thing to do.