Soil protection and their rational use

Lecture 11

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AND REHABILITATION ON UMG FIELDS

CAN ENVIRONMENTAL REHABILITATION PAY FOR ITSELF?
Included in the UMG loan was 3.3 million USD put aside for concerns related to the environment as mandated by WB procedure. From 1999 to the present, Ecology and Environment, Inc., (E&E) an American based company working with local subcontractors to include E&E Kazakhstan (E&EK) and CaspiEcology (CE), have endeavored to carry out the main environmental objectives within the selected Block 3A. They are:

• Perform an environmental audit;
• Conduct a pilot cleanup study and develop the best waste oil utilization strategy;
• Establish a state-of-the-art environmental laboratory;
• Develop Health and Safety and emergency response plans with associated equipment list;
• Define effective revegetation techniques

In past Soviet times the UMG field was environmentally exploited to a large extent. The main concern was to produce oil. Accordingly, the E&E Team faced very significant problems. A major objective was to not only to rehabilitate the environment but also to do so in a way that made such activities economically viable. In other words, make the rehabilitation pay for itself so UMG (and others) could justify to themselves the otherwise unprecedented and somewhat misunderstood environmental studies deemed necessary under the terms of the environmental loan. Using this approach, the Team felt that the present needs of UMG could be accomplished without compromising the current and future quality of environment around the field. Therefore, aspects of sustainable development would be realized.

To this extent our Team focused on two major endeavors, 1) oil field cleanup and waste oil recovery for sale or use as road material and 2) the construction of a profitable environmental laboratory that could be used by UMG and other companies to reliably measure the degree of environmental degradation or improvement with time.

Fig 1. Oil pool created during drilling operations

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