Aspectos sociais do descomissionamento no setor de petróleo e gás

Abstract

The second half of the 20th century was marked by a growing demand for energy, which led human beings to intensify the extraction of natural resources from the planet, among which: oil. It so happens that, currently, despite the high level of oil production in the world, many basins have become mature and, in some cases, economically unviable. Added to this is the end of the useful life of many installations that have been used in oil production for decades and the existing legal requirements that demand the proper restitution of the environment now explored. In this sense, decommissioning is the process that encompasses the last stage of the life cycle of oil exploration and production facilities. However, as in other stages of the production chain, decommissioning constitutes activities of considerable risk from a social, environmental and economic perspective, and should therefore be developed in the most sustainable and least impactful way. Seeking to fill the gap in the literature about the social aspects of decommissioning, this thesis has the general objective of discriminating and evaluating the social impacts throughout this process. In order to satisfactorily achieve this objective, the social impacts and stakeholders linked to decommissioning in the oil & gas sector were initially identified. Through a systematic literature review, twenty-six social impacts and thirty-two stakeholders were listed. Then, the text advances towards understanding the circumstances on the boundaries of decommissioning and the socioeconomic consequences of this scenario in the affected municipalities. Using panel data, linear regressions were performed to analyze the relationship between oil production and employment and budget revenue data in the Campos Basin region, where a considerable part of the projects to be decommissioned in the coming years are located. The results show that production in the Campos Basin has a positive relationship both with the number of formal jobs and with the budget revenue of municipalities, indicating that the decision to decommission must take into account the socioeconomic impacts on jobs and municipal revenue, impacts that must be foreseen from the project's planning stage. Finally, an analysis of the causal chain of social impacts is performed through the DPSIR framework, an acronym for drivers, pressure, state change, impacts and responses. This analysis results in a description of the items that make up each element of the DPSIR framework, with the respective indicators, as well as the application of this methodology to a real case of decommissioning. Throughout this work, the main social aspects of this last stage in the oil & gas sector are explained and potential and real conflicts that the activities trigger in society are described. Thereby, the discussions developed from the social approach sets the need to conduct a sustainable decommissioning that involves the engagement of multiple stakeholders in a democratic manner and with less exposure of society to the risks that emanate from this process.