Exxon Mobile Artic Driling

Exxon Mobile

Sustainability Assessment

Exxon Mobile is the world's largest publicly traded international oil and gas company (ExxonMobil, N.d.). The oil and gas industry has a challenge in terms of sustainability because of the nature of the business. The oil and gas industry operates almost exclusively on the extraction of fossil fuels, and the burning of these fuels contributes to greenhouse gas emissions which is one of the leading contributors to climate change. Therefore, the oil and gas industry is difficult to call sustainable in many regards as many people believe that we need the economy to shift to renewable resources as an energy source rather than fossil fuels.

Exxon's industry makes its decision making process difficult in regards to environmental sustainability. The company is somewhat torn between having to accept more dangerous drilling sites to return profits for their shareholders and being good environmental stewards. For example, the company was recently exploring an offshore drilling platform in the Canadian Artic. Such extraction techniques represent some of the most expensive in the world and most technically challenging. One reporter explains the situation as (Dawson, 2015):

"The Arctic holds billions of barrels of untapped oil reserves, but offshore-drilling costs there are among the highest in the world because of its remote location and severe weather. The Imperial-led consortium has been planning to drill a well as deep as 6 miles beneath the floor of the Beaufort Sea, one of the deepest offshore wells in the world and the deepest by far in the Arctic." (Dawson, 2015)

The artic region of Canada has been an area that has long been on Exxon's radar. However, it is interesting to note that it is only possible to drill in this region because of climate change.

The Arctic holds about one-third of the world's untapped natural gas and roughly 13% of the planet's undiscovered oil, according to the U.S. Geological Survey; more than three-quarters of Arctic deposits are offshore (Jerving, Jennings, Hirsch, & Rust, 2015).Imperial Oil, about 70% of which is owned by Exxon Mobil, began drilling in the frigid Arctic waters of the Canadian Beaufort Sea in the early 1970s. By the early 1990s, it had drilled two dozen exploratory wells. The company actually used climate models that were prepared by NASA in the 1990s to try and understand how climate predictions would affect their company's operations in place such as the artic -- which has been the source of much controversy.

Exxon Mobile hired their own internal team to study climate change. The company has been the center of controversy because of the fact that on one hand their scientists were telling the public that there was no reason to worry about the effects of climate change; that the science was still too blurry. However, on the other hand, the company's scientists were using climate models to try to predict how it would affect the artic and how they could use that to their advantage in future drilling operations.

"Today, as Exxon's scientists predicted 25 years ago, Canada's Northwest Territories has experienced some of the most dramatic effects of global warming. While the rest of the planet has seen an average increase of roughly 1.5 degrees in the last 100 years, the northern reaches of the province have warmed by 5.4 degrees and temperatures in central regions have increased by 3.6 degrees. (Jerving, Jennings, Hirsch, & Rust, 2015)"