Environmental management software helps refinery stay step ahead of regulators

Certain sorts of businesses are traveling an extra rough road to corporate sustainability, simply because of the nature of the business they are in. This is perhaps most true of companies that tie their livelihood to the oil and gas industry: many of them suffer closer scrutiny of their core environmental initiatives than would otherwise be accorded to companies of their size.

It was with this in mind that the Valero Refining Company’s California operation moved way back in 2004 to bring more discipline to its environmental initiatives. The immediate motivator was Title V, which governs reporting of air pollution factors, although even then, Valero was keeping tabs on the possibility of national legislation governing carbon footprint reporting.

According to Valero’s principal environmental engineer, Don Cuffel, the company has roughly 50,000 compliance conditions that it needs to track in order to meet its various citation and compliance regulations. About 50 users now rely on the Enviance System to keep an ongoing record of these conditions. One of the most challenging aspects of the collection process is the the collection methodologies are not consistent, regulation to regulation, which makes data categorization more difficult, according to Cuffel.

What Enviance does is create a master repository of environmental information that is time stamped and that can be sliced and diced depending on the law you're reporting for. "The system is indifferent to what exactly you are measuring," says Cuffel. Which means it could just as easily be applied to water usage considerations as it could be applied to a refinery's air emissions profile. And it could be used to prepare the same data for a federal report, state report, municipal report or so on. Here's more information.

By using the software, Valero has been able to gain back the time it would have otherwise needed to devote to undergoing manual inspections of its facilities. Previously, it was using home-grown but well-intended software that could meet the reporting requirements of Title V.

Cuffel says the irony of having access to Enviance information is that sometimes his team is one step of the environmental laws and sometimes knows about changes even before field inspectors. "We're actually ahead of the regulators on top of what our obligations might be and what is truly necessary," he says.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com