MEASURING ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE FOR OIL AND GAS FIRMS

摘要

The purpose of this article is to examine the environmental performance of oil and gas companies' upstream operations. Upstream operations involve all the activities necessary to develop oil and gas properties and to extract the raw petroleum products. The environmental performance of this segment of the industry has not been studied adequately because upstream activities are regulated in the U.S. by the individual states instead of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Being excluded from centralized oversight makes environmental data on drilling and crude oil production difficult to obtain and consolidate. Unlike other heavy industries, such as chemicals, steel, and paper, pollution produced by oil and gas drilling is not tracked by consolidated, single-source databases such as the Toxics Release Index (Patten, 2002; Clarkson et al., 2008; Cong and Friedman, 2011), the Council on Economic Priorities (CEP) indices (Wiseman, 1982; Ilinitch et al., 1998; Hughes et al., 2001) or KLD Research and Analytics (Cho and Patten, 2007). Instead, researchers interested in the environmental performance of oil and gas drillers would be required to understand the separate regulatory environments and gain access to the disparate computer systems of the individual states where drilling occurs.