Is one oil company better than others, environmentally?

In My Humble Opinion
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I’ll take it as a given that no oil company is environmentally friendly enough to win the admiration of environmentally-concerned consumers.

That said, I’m wondering if any of them are “less harmful” than others in a significant way.

I have been told that I should boycott Exxon because of the incomplete Exxon Valdez cleanup, and because Exxon is “the primary company pushing for drilling in ANWAR”. Is one company pushing harder for drilling in ANWAR than the others?

Amoco is guilty of the Amoco Cadiz spill – long ago, but a bad one.

BP has an “alternative energy” promotional campaign, but problems with their pipeline recently came to light, involving some minor spillage and major worries, and if I understand correctly, their business dealings have been under investigation (I see them in headlines in the business section occasionally).

I’ve been told that Citgo uses Venezuelan oil – which apparently is acceptable to some of my politically-opinionated friends, who like seeing Chavez twist George Bush’s tail. But I doubt Chavez is an environmental hero.

And I’m dubious that any oil company has what an environmentalist would call a clean record.

I wuldn’t mind the extra effort of patronizing one specific firm if I thought it really did “the least damage”, however. Nor would I mind taking my business away from the worst offenders…although I know it’d be a drop in the bucket, at most.

Anyone have the Straight Dope on this?

Sailboat

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Jared Diamond talks about the environmental practices of different oil companies in Collapse. He says that Chevron manages oil wells much better from an environmental and employee safety perspective than Pertamina (the Indonesian national oil company), at least in the cases of the drilling sites he visited.

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Full disclosure: I hold a mid-level management position in an oil field services company. I’m not in a position to be able to point to specific companies that might be ‘greener’ than others, but as I’ll outline below, I personally think that individual boycotts of one company or another would not be the most effective tactic anyway.

As a start, however, you might want to look at how the big US companies are using the large cash reserves they have been building up over the past couple of years of high product prices. Is all of that cash earmarked for exploration or acquisiton? What percentage, if any, is to be used for reclamation, or the mitigation of environmental effects caused by their business?

Now, some other comments, just off the top of my pointy head:

  1. How could they? As I understand the environmentalist viewpoint, a large industry of this nature could never have an acceptably clean record; the very nature of its existence, and its gigantic scale, is environmentally unacceptable.

  2. I’d say you haven’t much chance, as a consumer, of successfully avoiding the products of a given oil or gas company if you don’t like their environmental record. There is too much integration in the industry, and too much cross-selling of both crude and refined products among various companies.

  3. What Anne Neville said. Although most people in the US tend to think of the large US-based, publicly-traded oil companies when they think of the oil and gas industry, there are many, many private or state-owned foreign firms that approach or exceed the ExxonMobils and BPs in size, who operate in environments where regulation is poorly enforced or subject to corruption, and whose products you are probably using without ever knowing who provided them, or that company’s environmental record. I won’t say that avoiding the products of one oil and gas company over another is impossible, just that if one wants to reward environmental responsibility, a more effective, and less difficult-to-manage, tactic would be to simply minmize as much as possible one’s own use of any petroleum product. Just my opinion; I’m not married to it.

  4. Regardless of my employer, I have no particular reason or incentive to serve as an apologist for Big Oil; I can only say that one of the roles of the company I work for is to monitor drilling operations for various problems that often have environmental implications, including prevention of well ‘blowouts’ and detecting the spillage at surface of oil or other possibly harmful liquids. This is a service which costs these clients between 1-3% of their total drilling costs, not counting whatever savings may take place as a result of prevention of these events.