An Integrative Environmental Performance Index for Benchmarking in Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract Significant environmental impacts are characteristic for oil and gas companies. Therefore, there is a special concern regarding the control of environmental indicators reported by these companies. However, it is difficult to compare the environmental performance between them because of the heterogeneity of such indicators used in the companies' sustainability reports. Thus, this paper proposes an assessment framework that consolidates environmental sustainability indicators reported by oil and gas companies into an integrative index. This index allows performing a benchmarking of the oil and gas industry. The proposed framework is based on a multi-criteria approach which uses an S-curve scale transformation for standardizing the indicators and multi-attribute utility theory for consolidating the indicators. We investigated international sustainability guidelines to define the main environmental indicators to be compared and then analyzed environmental performance data collected from eleven top global oil and gas companies. As a result, we identify nine main indicators and rank the eleven companies according to their overall scores.

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