Sustainability

We maintain appropriate sustainable development policies, and implement a responsible attitude to ecosystems in the best interest of both Federal and Regional governments. Currently, our fundamental environmental protection policy is to effectively mitigate the impact of our work on the sites we operate, whilst having a constructive and rational perspective on the natural world. With oil and gas extraction, this ultimately entails identifying and minimizing potential hazards and risks to both our employees and the local environment, which we aim to preserve and restore for the benefit of contemporary society and future generations. Thus, respecting nature is an essential element of our corporate strategy and culture, with our organization routinely conducting extensive work to ensure ecological safety and security. Chiefly, this involves monitoring all areas of our production activities to create and revise plans that can result in improved operational performance, including increasing the scope of our ecological preservation efforts. A major component of this is the facilitation of investment in maintaining the highest standards possible, with Rusneftegaz acting as a socially conscious company by regularly introducing new, advanced technology and modern equipment to save resources. The application of these innovations requires staff to adapt to changes in our conservation strategies, which are wholly endorsed by our managers and directors, on a routine basis.

The minimization of the impact our work has on our surroundings, together with any corresponding risks, is wholly dependent on the implementation of the best available technologies, in addition to embracing the latest technical and scientific methods and ideas. Therefore, we are actively seeking to better our current undertakings with effective environmental management across all areas of our enterprise, including our subsidiaries, affiliates and partners. As a consequence, we continually look to educate our personnel to boost their ecological knowledge and understanding, while also expanding our cooperation with third parties such as governmental ministries and agencies. Being one of our key principles, we insist upon remaining transparent with regard to our sustainability efforts. As a central pillar of our business, we always prioritize the prevention of serious incidents, in contrast to potentially having to alleviate the consequences of a man-made occurrence. Hence, Rusneftegaz retains and routinely reviews comprehensive and detailed plans to prevent and manage any oil spills that may occur, in conjunction with all other potential disasters. An integral part of this entails possessing comprehensive and specialized insurance coverage at all times, principally to ensure that the financial and ecological costs of such a crisis can be met, whilst guaranteeing that the long-term effects of an event will not cause severe damage either to our corporation or the affected area.

Consequently, our organization has undertaken a series of measures to ensure the sustainability of our operations. Namely, this includes utilizing modular facilities on oilfields to reduce the volume of construction on-location, while minimizing the amount of necessary groundwork. This occurs conjointly with the adoption of both advanced biotechnologies and soil treatment methods to restore contaminated sites and remove pollutants from an area. For example, in places that are regularly at low or freezing temperatures that would otherwise be difficult to manage, Rusneftegaz has deployed a bacterium that is capable of degrading hydrocarbons, therefore organically treating land in need of restoration. More commonly, however, we use phytoremediation to repair soils and biodegrade hydrocarbon-based contaminants, primarily through the cultivation of grasses with expansive branched root systems. These structures allow gaseous exchange to take place over a larger surface area, yielding a greater quantity of biologically active substances. Such plants also provide a low-cost process of reclamation via the provision of an optimized ecosystem that allows the decay of these particles at an accelerated speed. Thus, grass seeds are always sewn in a mixture, as some of these species are hardier than other varieties. Intrinsically, the growth of new flora is a reliable indicator of effective soil recovery, depending on the underlying climatic and environmental conditions.

​On the contrary, good sustainable practices extend further than merely preserving the environment in which we extract petroleum. We have always rigorously upheld and maintained the highest safety standards possible, exceeding local requirements and international recommendations, by systematically administering our compliance with these codes. Moreover, refuse disposal is frequently associated with significant environmental risk in our industry, with our organization consuming considerable amounts of water in all our commercial activities. Rusneftegaz has, therefore, adopted new policies and state-of-the-art equipment to minimize or eliminate waste in all areas of our business, whilst also committing to reduce our consumption of the fluid. The latter involves recycling and reusing what we use, ultimately by reducing the per-unit impurities in wastewater, and also by treating a larger volume of the potable water discharged throughout our normal operations. We intend to do our utmost to uphold the integrity of the environments in which we work, from our production fields in West Siberia, to our offices across the Russian Federation. Such endeavors, when arranged in unison, will provide long-term benefits for our company through both the mitigation of costs and the preservation of the health of our workforce. Fundamentally, this should ensure that we continue to prosper not only in the immediate future, but the years and decades ahead.