Sustainability

Rusneftegaz maintains appropriate sustainable development policies, and implements 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 on, whilst having a constructive and rational attitude to natural resources. With oil and gas production, this ultimately entails identifying and minimizing potential hazards and risks to both our staff and both 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 component in our corporate strategy and culture, with our organization routinely conducting extensive work to ensure ecological safety and security. Primarily, this involves monitoring all areas of our production activities to create and revise strategies that can result in improved operational performance, including increasing the scope of our environmental protection efforts. A major component of this is the facilitation of investment in maintaining the highest ecological preservation standards possible, with Rusneftegaz, as a socially responsible company, regularly introducing new, advanced technologies and modern equipment to save resources. The implementation of these innovations requires staff to adapt to changes in our environmental policies, which are 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 always seeking to better our current undertakings with effective environmental management across all areas of our company, including our subsidiaries, affiliates and partners. As a result, we continually look to educate our personnel to boost their ecological knowledge and understanding, whilst also expanding our cooperation with third parties, including governmental ministries and agencies, and insist upon remaining transparent regarding our sustainability efforts. As a central pillar of our business, Rusneftegaz always prioritizes the prevention of serious incidents, in contrast to potentially having to mitigate the consequences of a man-made occurrence. Hence, Rusneftegaz retains and regularly reviews comprehensive and detailed plans to prevent and manage any oil spills that may occur, in conjunction with all other potential serious incidents. A component of this involves possessing at all times extensive and specialized insurance coverage, principally to ensure that the financial and ecological costs of such a crisis can be met, whilst guaranteeing that the long-term consequences of an event will not cause severe damage either to Rusneftegaz 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 whilst minimizing the amount of necessary groundwork, 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, thus biologically 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 extensive branched root systems. These structures allow gaseous exchange to take place over a larger surface area, yielding a greater volume 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 hydrocarbons at an accelerated speed. Therefore, grasses are always sewn in mixtures, as some of these are hardier than other varieties, and the growth of new flora is a reliable indicator of effective soil recovery, depending on the underlying climatic and environmental conditions.

​On the other hand, good sustainable practices extend further than merely preserving the environment in which we extract petroleum. Rusneftegaz has 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, particularly in our industry, is commonly associated with significant environmental risk, and our organization consumes considerable amounts of water in across all of our business activities. Rusneftegaz has, therefore, adopted new policies and state-of-the-art equipment to minimize or eliminate waste in all areas of our operations, whilst also committing to reduce water consumption. The latter includes recycling and reusing the water we use, ultimately by reducing the per-unit contaminants in wastewater, and also by treating a greater volume of the potable water discharged throughout our normal production operations. Rusneftegaz intends to do our utmost to ensure the integrity of the environments in which we work, from our production fields in West Siberia, to our offices across the Russian Federation. Such efforts, when arranged in unison, should 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 our organization prospers not only in the immediate future, but the years and decades ahead.