The Sustainability Assessment Model (SAM)
Business has a fundamental role to play in delivering sustainable development – the process needed to achieve a sustainable society. Sustainable development is becoming increasingly recognised as a critical issue for the oil and gas industry to address and act upon. This paper outlines a practical tool, The Sustainability Assessment Model (SAM), which has been developed to analyse, compare and rank sustainability performance.
The SAM assesses the social, environmental, economic, and resource usage impacts of a project over its full life cycle including product use. It also helps address the remediation and restoration options. This model monetises all the impacts so that they can be compared on a like-for-like basis and also allows the impacts to be combined into a single measure which reflects the overall sustainable development performance of a project.
This paper will show how SAM has been used to assess the performance of several energy projects. A project focus was initially adopted in the belief that greater control over impacts can be influenced and achieved at this level. However this paper will also show how the tool has
been used to:
- aid specific design decisions such as concept selection; and
- assess the overall holistic sustainability performance of an industry sector.