Speaker: Rob Bruant
Topic: ESG Reporting in the Oil and Gas Sector - A Permian Basin Water Management Perspective
Date: Wednesday, October 20th, 2021 at 11:30 AM
Location: Brookhaven Campus - Dallas College, Building H Room 125
Cost: $25 if SPE member paying electronically in advance, all others $30
- Reservation AND/OR Credit Card ONLINE Payment at:
http://www.spedallas.org/
Please remember to bring your computer generated receipt to show that you have paid by credit card.
Abstract
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors include a host of issues not treated as part of conventional accounting or financial analysis but represent material contributions to present and future enterprise value. First described in the seminal 2005 report Who Cares Wins, the consideration of ESG criteria was deemed both good business practice and a means to improve societal benefit. Numerous studies since support that how companies address ESG factors serves as a useful indicator of management quality and overall risk, both contributing factors to firm success and long-term value.
Despite growing recognition and utilization of ESG factors to establish firm value and drive investment decisions, significant discrepancy and disagreement persist on consistently defining, capturing, and applying ESG-associated metrics. Much of the current complexity and uncertainty regarding ESG interpretation, and relationship to both financial performance and firm sustainability, stems from the befuddling characteristics of corporate reporting, including:
- Broad and disparate ESG definitions
- Voluntary disclosure
- Unverified data quality
- Biases related to company size, industry maturity, greenwashing
To better understand and address the quality, consistency, and completeness of ESG reporting within the Oil and Gas sector, B3 evaluated the 50 largest water disposers in the Permian Basin regarding water-related Environmental (i.e., E of ESG) metrics. Of these companies, only one-third provide organization-aggregated water management performance metrics, generally in the form of Corporate Sustainability Reports. Additionally, less than one-tenth of firms report data in a manner aligned with any one of the leading sustainability reporting frameworks (e.g., CDP, GRI, SASB, IPIECA, SDG). And none of the companies provide geographic specificity to their disclosures. As a result, only cursory peer-to-peer assessment and benchmarking could be performed. However, a significant opportunity was realized to both augment and validate current environmental disclosures by aggregating and integrating additional publicly available data. We show how this combination provides a more comprehensive and complete water management picture, both within and between companies, to assess environmental impact and contribution to overall enterprise value.
Biography
Rob Bruant is Director of Product for B3 Insight, a technology firm specializing in the collection, aggregation, analysis, and dissemination of water use data, with an emphasis on extractive industries. Previously, Rob served in various roles for BP and Pioneer Natural Resources, including Subsurface Manager, Reservoir Engineer, and Petroleum Systems Analyst. Rob also held positions of Instructor and Research Associate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University, focusing on carbon sequestration and groundwater remediation.
Rob holds a B.A. in Geosciences from Franklin and Marshall College, a Ph.D. in Hydrology from the University of Arizona, and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is Membership Chairperson for the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Sequestration (CCUS) Technical Section, Vice-Chairperson for the Texas Water and Energy Institute Advisory Board, and a member of the Produced Water Society Board of Directors. He is the recipient of SPE's Outstanding Technical Editor, Regional Service, Regional HSSE, and Section Service awards. Rob is a licensed Professional Geoscientist, Professional Hydrologist (Ground Water and Water Quality), and Certified Petroleum Engineer.
