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Key Issues - Environment

Emissions & Pollutants

The cycle of developing, producing, transporting, refining and delivering oil to end-users presents significant environmental challenges. In response to these challenges, the industry has embarked on a number of initiatives to ensure that it will continue reducing its environmental impact into the future. This is achieved through SAPIA’s Petroleum Industry Engineering and Environment Committee and the Refinery Managers’ Environmental Forum. Both of these committees manage the industry’s environmental efforts.

SAPIA is an associate member of the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (IPIECA), based in London, which enables the activities of the industry committees to be benchmarked against best international environmental practice.

The SAPIA Engineering and Environmental Committee’s anti-pollution strategies include:

• Jointly-owned oil spill response equipment at all ports and harbours.
• Partnership with Transnet Ports Authority to enable use of response equipment by multiple parties.
• Positioning of 41 jointly-owned oil spill response trailers on road and rail transport routes in South Africa and the neighbouring states.
• Common standards for the construction and installation of fuel storage and distribution facilities to prevent leaks or spillages.
• Development of facility standards to prevent fuel leaks from underground storage tanks, such as the installation of double-walled tanks with interstitial monitoring, fitment of automatic tank gauging and fitment of double-walled piping.
• Development of a response agreement that provides for the company owning a storage facility closest to a site of contamination to manage the remediation whether they are responsible or not. This ensures that timely action is taken.
• Development of a common emission management strategy, common emission reporting protocol and common flaring report protocol by the Refinery Managers’ Environmental Forum (RMEF) to manage the environmental implications of their activities. Individual refineries have invested heavily in the installation of new emission control technology. These are a few of the initiatives that have resulted in the significant improvement in emission releases.
• Joint monitoring of air emissions at shared facilities.
• Formulation of a long-term roadmap by the Future Fuels Working Group to determine the most suitable fuel specifications for South Africa that, together with improved vehicle technology, will result in a reduction of harmful vehicle emissions.

SAPIA’s recycling efforts include:

• Founding Recycling Oil Saves the Foundation (ROSE) in 1994 which manages the collection, storage and recycling of used lubricating oils.
• Collecting and recycling 400-million litres of oil under the ROSE recycling programme.
• Collecting more than 350 tons of empty lubricating oil cans and 100 tons of plastic containers from service station forecourts throughout South Africa in November 2008, under the auspices of ROSE.
• Facilitating the formation of the National Oil Recycling Association of South Africa (NORA-SA) in 2007.
• Promoting the collection and recycling of used oil on a wider scale through the ISO 14001 process through NORA-SA. 85-million litres of used oil collected under the auspices of NORA-SA in 2008 and 165-million litres collected by the NORA-SA members since formation of the association.