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Environmental performance
The scale and complexity of developing hydrocarbon resources continues to increase across the petroleum industry, and the expectations to bring vital energy supplies to market while reducing environmental impacts continues to grow. As our diverse portfolio of projects spans the globe and requires us to work in remote and sensitive environments—arctic locations, deep water, and biodiverse onshore locations—we are committed to operating in a way that protects the environment.
What we said in 2008, what we did in 2009, and what we plan to do in the future.
ExxonMobil's continued efforts to identify areas for environmental improvement have reduced impacts to the environment, improved safety, and decreased operating costs.
Understanding the full life cycle of our operations is important to operating in an environmentally sustainable manner. There are four key steps, which are integral to the life cycle of our operations.
ExxonMobil identifies biodiversity protection objectives and actions for each location through our Environmental Business Planning efforts.
ExxonMobil seeks to reduce the footprint of our operations through project design assessments, enhancements to ongoing operations, and advances in technology.
ExxonMobil is committed to the prevention of spills from our operations. We have increased emphasis on equipment reliability, individual accountability in daily activities to reduce human error, training to address high spill risk areas, and increased infrastructure inspections.
ExxonMobil is committed to reducing the emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), sulfur dioxide (SO2), and nitrogen oxides (NOx) from our operations.
Ensuring sufficient freshwater quantity and quality involves understanding supply and demand trends, assessing potential impacts on quality, and implementing steps to address trends and impacts.
ExxonMobil uses a tiered approach to reduce both hazardous and nonhazardous waste.
Our worldwide environmental expenditures in 2009 totaled about $5.1 billion.
Collectively, our employees, contractors, and subcontractors worked 8 million hours on remediation projects in 2009.
Through our natural land management strategy and proactive stakeholder engagement, we work to create opportunities for beneficial reuse of inactive properties.
