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The Sustainability Sessions spotlights action-oriented companies that pave the way towards more sustainable futures. Using cutting-edge solutions at all stages of the value chain, GLJ’s virtual presenters outline how their organizations actively support companies to reach ESG and sustainability targets and reduce emissions.
The Wild World of Waste Disposal
As someone who is passionate about supporting Canada’s world leading performance in the energy sector, I spend a lot of time reading Sustainability reports. These reports set the stage for what initiatives companies are working on today and what direction the industry is headed. One of my favorite illustrations, which I find in most reports, is a slide in which a company categorizes the importance and impact of each ESG initiative. See Tourmaline’s 2020 Sustainability Report below as a fine example. I often see GHG Emissions, Waste, Water and Responsible Supply Chain as of high importance and impact and my team at Galatea and I have developed our tool we call Waste Coordinator to give producers a way to more-actively manage these risks.
While increasing government regulation around GHG emission reductions and funding programs to support mitigation are the near term focus, as you can see by the illustration above, the Sustainability conversation is a lot more than emissions.
Let’s talk about the “Green Elephant” in the room; and for those of you that follow along not to be confused with our advisor Bertrand Groulx’s Verdazo blog post titled the “White Elephant In The Room”. According to S&P Global, Scope 1 and 2 emissions make up only 5-10% of producers’ GHG emissions. This means 90-95% of a Producers’ emissions are Scope 3. As our industry matures and technologies like Ambyint and Qube help producers manage and quantify Scope 1 and 2 emissions, scrutiny is already intensifying on Scope 3 emissions.
Waste Coordinator was designed to help producers quantify Scope 3 emissions as they move fluids (waste, produced water, flowback, emulsion etal.) to destination or disposal.
Waste Coordinator was developed to give operators complete transparency on every load. In 2019, through Alberta Innovates Digital Innovation in Clean Energy program we incorporated GHG emissions into our multivariate optimization algorithm that provides producers a platform to find the best option on every load. Waste Coordinator calculates the full cost of trucking, disposal, wait times, GHG costs using real-time market intelligence and predictive models to ensure your operations teams have the data they need to make the best decisions. For the first time, our platform allows producers to compare disposal, reuse, treatment and recycling options all while quantifying both reductions in cost and environmental impacts. We’ve consistently been saving our clients +15% on these costs which can have a large impact on both OPEX, GHG and waste volume reductions.
Another point we often hear from our clients is the appreciation for the transparency a platform like ours affords to supply chain management. As recent M&A activity indicates, the waste disposal market is evolving constantly and when this represents such a large portion of the industry’s overall OPEX, having line of sight on full market data is crucial to decision making. We have found success by giving producers a platform to both source disposal capacity as well as market their own internal capacity whether that’s a disposal well, an injection well in an EOR flood or a third-party approved landfill.
Lastly, I want to talk about the future. We’ve experienced first-hand that it’s getting incredibly hard to find qualified truck drivers especially in the oilfield tank truck sector. Efficiency optimization tools like Waste Coordinator allow transporters to maximize utilization. This will become increasingly critical in our industry if we want to sustain or grow production.
I have been seeing a word appear in Sustainability reports at a noticeably increased frequency and the word is “ephemeralization” which was coined by Buckminster Fuller in 1938. In essence it means to leverage technology to do more with less. We designed Waste Coordinator as a tool to allow energy producers to do exactly that. To quote one of our client’s recent emails “It’s hard to believe how inefficiently we used to manage this process before Waste Coordinator”.
We are proud to work with industry leading producers who collaborate with us to develop tools that capture and collect the data needed to support Canada’s world leading energy narrative and after reading all of those Sustainability reports I mentioned it’s a narrative we share together with our industry and are all passionate about.
At Galatea we see a future in which logistics workflows are automated, digitized and optimized in real-time allowing producers to focus on finding and developing world leading energy assets. Learn more at www.galateatech.com or follow us on Linkedin.
