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| Air Quality Research |
Define Audit Reward
Define the Characteristics of a "Green Refinery"
Audit All Participating Refineries
Reward Best Performing/Least Polluting Refineries
Introduction
The Green Refineries project addresses the difficult environmental issues that refineries face and seeks to find ways to reward refiners who create the least amount of pollution as they process crude oil. There are three steps towards achieving this goal:
1. Define the Characteristics of a Green Refinery
A "Green Refinery" produces the least amount of pollution per barrel of oil processed. Pollutants may be to land, water or air, and include greenhouse gases. Green Refineries have established procedures to monitor and reduce pollution. Those procedures are audited to ensure that the requirements of the environmental program are not compromised. The characteristics of a "Green Refinery" are specified in an audit form/Score Card located at: http://files.harc.edu/Projects/AirQuality/GreenRefineriesScoreCard.pdf ( 34 KB). Refiners, environmental groups, regulators and all other interested parties are encouraged to provide comments to develop a fair and comprehensive assessment of the overall environmental performance of refineries.
2. Audit All Participating Refineries
In order to rate and rank refineries an auditing process using an independent industry sponsored auditor (for example, someone like Solomon Associates that performs confidential economic comparison analysis for refineries) is needed. The detailed scoring would not be made available to regulators, environmental groups or the general public. The results of the "Score Card" information will only be provided to those refiners who submit data, and no one else. All company names will be removed from the Score Card results prior to being sent to the participating refineries, so that the refiners will not be identified by their competitors.
3. Reward Best Performing/Least Polluting Refiners
In order to garner industry interest in developing a Green Refineries Score Card and become participants in an environmental audit program they must have rewards. Some examples that may encourage participation include providing emission credits, allowing more access to permits, and providing formal recognition to all refineries that qualify as "Green Refineries". Other items that provide competitive advantages to the green refiners should also be considered.
Please send any comments about this project to acuclis@harc.edu.
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| Page Updated/Reviewed: 05/23/2006 9:23 AM |
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