Arquivos

As a concept of concern and study, the social issue emerged in the 19th century in light of terrible working and housing conditions. Since then, the social issue is no longer a debate only about working conditions but involves other topics such as unemployment, education, health, transport, housing, basic sanitation, security, leisure, culture, and food security, as well as discussions about class inequality, gender, race/ethnicity, income, and/or socioeconomic status, among other topics that affect the general well-being of a given population.

In this way, the social issue does not have a single dimension as initially assumed; it acquires a multidimensional amplitude to the extent that the systemic effects produced by the economic issue are not only dimensionable within the scope of the production process. Through a systemic analysis, we can perceive the side effects of the emphasis on the economic issue outweighing the social issue, both from a positive and negative point of view, as well as throughout the entire production chain, from the extraction of raw materials through production, marketing, consumption, dismantling, until reaching the final destination. Decommissioning is an activity referring to the end of the life cycle of projects or activities in different sectors, such as a nuclear plant (Sudholt, 2013; Suh et al., 2018) [1,2], a mine complex (Amirshenava and Osanloo, 2018) [3], a solar energy generation plant (Guédez et al., 2015) [4], or decommissioning of oil and gas processes (Fowler et al. 2014; Kruse et al. 2015; Herion et al. 2015; Cripps and Aabel 2002; Ekins et al. 2006; Martins et al. 2020) [5,6,7,8,9,10].

The development of the first offshore oil and gas facilities dates back to 1897 (Bradley, 1987) [11]. There are approximately 7500 offshore oil and gas platforms and facilities, which include floating production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessels and sub-sea platforms and facilities (ICF, 2015) [12], located mainly in the North Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and areas offshore near California and Southeast Asia (Eduardo et al., 2008) [13]. Approximately 85% of these facilities need to be deactivated in the coming decades (Fowler, 2014) [5] in compliance with international and regional conventions, where the majority of them need to be removed completely to be dismantled and recycled (Li & Hu, 2021) [14].

For decommissioning projects with an emphasis on offshore sub-sea systems and equipment, the delimitation of the system boundary is to be considered at the end of the life cycle from a social point of view, i.e., the processes, activities, and flows of inputs and outputs involved since the withdrawal of waste from the seabed, until its final disposal, relates to activities carried out at sea (offshore) as well as on land (onshore).

Offshore activities refer to the movement of vessels involved, directly and indirectly, in the removal of waste to be decommissioned, and onshore activities refer to those involved in port operations and logistics related to the destination of pipelines and equipment.

Implementing decommissioning programs involves an extensive chain of activities, with high costs and complexity due to the involvement of various stakeholders, such as operators, supply chain suppliers, government organizations, NGOs and other users of the sea (Users of the sea are those who use the ocean for various purposes, such as maritime commerce, fishing, passenger transportation, tourism, leisure activities, and exploitation of mineral and energy resources, among others). These impact various affected dimensions, such as environmental, health and safety, social, economic, and technical, among others (Oil & Gas UK, 2015; Henrion, 2015; Ahiaga-Dagbui et al., 2017; Martins et al., 2020) [7,10,15,16]. For example, the action of decommissioning a submarine system can have the positive consequence of creating jobs in the territory. The road transport of extracted pipelines and equipment could negatively impact certain locations through an increase in traffic within municipalities directly involved, the pollution generated, damage to roads due to the use of heavy vehicles, and even the possibility of damaging houses with more fragile infrastructures.

Planning and managing decommissioning projects comprise a collective effort that involves several stakeholders. The big challenge is obtaining records of platforms that were built decades ago (Na et al., 2017) [17] and potentially conflicting objectives between thm, related to the breakdown of socioeconomic and environmental impacts generated from technological decommissioning alternatives (Martins et al., 2020) [10].

In April 2020, the National Petroleum Agency (ANP), the Brazilian regulatory body for oil and gas O&G, published the decommissioning regulation, ANP Resolution N^o. 817/2020. Besides updating and simplifying legal requirements, the technical regulation for decommissioning exploration and production facilities showed clearer standards and information necessary for decision-making.

Although the term “social” appears only three times in the text, it is in the sole paragraph of Article 5 that its importance in that document becomes clear. In this section, the ANP states that the operator “must have a social awareness and sustainability management system in place that adheres to the best practices of the oil industry, observing the contract and, where relevant, follow the guidelines to achieve the 17 Objectives of Sustainable Development (SDG) of the United Nations” (ANP, 2020) [18].

By citing the need to require the operator to have a social awareness management system, the ANP clarifies that projects cannot focus on impacts in a specific manner. A management system includes actions at all levels, strategic, tactical and operational, besides the participation of professionals from all areas of the operator who work directly and indirectly, interacting with different audiences. Therefore, besides the technical area, other areas, such as social responsibility, licensing, and legal and commercial risks, to name a few, must also be included.

It is important to highlight that Brazil was the first country to launch a certifiable standard on the subject by the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT) in 2004, the ABNT 16001 [19]. The version revised in 2012 that is commonly used in the country follows the guidelines of the international social responsibility standard, ISO 26000:2010 (ABNT, 2010) [20]. It is worth highlighting that the alignment with the 17 SDGs also makes clear the regulatory agency’s concern with integrating the various decommissioning projects with public policies related to the country’s sustainable development.

The action of decommissioning is a process at the end of the economic and productive life of the asset, a decision on the best way to close the wells, clean, make the facilities safe, remove some or all of the facilities and reuse or discard them, as right to the closing of operations at the end of a field’s life.

According to Fowler et al. (2014) [5], decommissioning decisions involve a wide range of considerations, including potential environmental impacts, financial costs to the industry, socioeconomic impacts and health and safety issues. Various stakeholder groups may also have additional considerations that are specific to their interests. These considerations are important to ensure equality and avoid conflicts during decision-making. In this paper, modeling social impact categories and the proposition of a system of indicators will be the priority object of the intended description.

Thus, the analysis of the social context (jobs created and/or maintained, logistical and urban infrastructure, activities carried out at sea, among others) of each submarine system (pipelines and equipment) to be decommissioned is the basis for assessing social impacts generated by this process, mainly regarding the affected territories, since the people living in these territories are the most susceptible to suffering direct impacts from decommissioning actions.

Decommissioning is carried out safely when the options to be considered appropriate take into account social and environmental impacts and their geographic variations (Gourvenec, 2022) [21]. There are three themes related to the social values of offshore structures and social well-being related to material and immaterial resources; the interests of different stakeholder groups regarding the degree of support for decommissioning projects; and the resources and assets of these projects. (Elrick-Barr et. Al, 2022) [22].

The social impacts of decommissioning activities are assessed using social indicators. These indicators can be subjective or objective, quantitative or qualitative, and are linked to a specific set of values. They carry social significance due to their contextual dependence (UNEP-SETAC, 2009; Franks, 2011) [23,24].

Therefore, the proposition of impact categories comes after a system of indicators capable of evaluating the social impacts caused by any of the various decommissioning alternatives; it must have in its structure effective dialogical approaches that ensure the participation of society and territories correlated to the operations relating to the modeled system.

The assessment of social impacts is of great value for the management and prevention of technical and non-technical risks, especially in the extractive industry, as they point out the following benefits generated from the management of social impacts (Prenzel and Vanclay, 2014; BSR, 2011 and Esteves et al., 2012) [25,26,27]:

The removal or retention of offshore structures does not have much support from society until there are more studies and empirical evidence available to justify decommissioning projects for marine artificial structures and must be decided on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the balance between costs and benefits at hand in a local level. (Knights et al., 2024) [28].

When assessing impacts, it is necessary to consider some aspects, such as the need for stakeholder involvement in the initial stages of identifying impacts associated with processes, understanding the impossibility of predicting all impacts because of the dynamic nature of territories and society, the need for experience by those responsible for assessing impacts, the search for meeting the expectations of interested parties, as well as their inclusion in the participatory and decision-making process (Esteves et al., 2012, Burdge and Vanclay, 2012, Silva, 2017) [27,29,30].

According to Fowler et al. (2014) [5], direct stakeholder participation is increasingly being used in socio-environmental decisions because it leads to a more holistic understanding of the problem requiring a decision; decisions are more likely to be optimized for multiple conflicting objectives and promote trust and acceptance of final decisions.

Stakeholders such as public authorities, the local community, workers, economic agents, and organized civil society also influence decommissioning activities based on interactions. In short, just as companies depend on the way society works, companies impact the functioning of society (Goedkoop et al., 2018) [31]. In this sense, the possibilities generated from the social impact assessment process are (Burdge and Vanclay (2012) [29]:

In this sense, social indicators are fundamental as they provide important information that allows evaluation of the status of achieving the intended objectives, provide fundamental data concerning the planning of future actions, and become more relevant in academia and the business world. They also promote greater transparency in the actions of economic agents (Huebíček et al., 2015) [32]. This occurs because stakeholders know the entire process, as organizations disclose their practices and the impacts of their actions related to sustainability (Calabrese et al., 2016; Bellantuono et al., 2016) [33,34].

When choosing a set of indicators that can represent the impacts generated, as well as their social significance in relation to the context of the decommissioning system to be analyzed, it becomes necessary to establish their level of materiality “from which the aspects become significant enough to be reported (GRI, 2015) [35].

Inserting sustainability considerations into the decommissioning process will increase existing decommissioning litigation and the development of new ones, and the panorama of international regulations for the decommissioning of offshore installations generally adopts the premise of complete removal at the end of the life cycle. However, considerations about the immediate impacts of issues relating to sustainability are important for the discussion (Balogun et al., 2023) [36]. This means that the economic, operational and/or environmental issues should not only subordinate the analysis and planning of the object of study—decommissioning offshore oil and gas exploration systems—as is usually encouraged. The study of the decommissioning of submarine oil exploration systems involves implementing a type of analysis not oriented exclusively to the determinants of economic and/or environmental issues but also social scenarios appropriate to activities in the territories influenced by decommissioning. Decommissioning the offshore oil and gas sector is crucial and highly complex, as variables such as costs, health and safety, and environmental consequences are at stake (Shams et al., 2023) [37].

Dubois-Iorgulescu et al. (2016) [38] presented two conceptual views of the system that normally coexist: a technical approach based on the definition of technical processes according to the stages of the life cycle and a socioeconomic approach that selects organizations as units of the system. Four groups set the criteria used here to delimit the system boundary: (1) social significance, these are qualitative criteria, which have a social meaning in terms of impact generated by the process, and which should only to be out from the system when they are not there is a change in the result; (2) empirical limitations, the cutoff criteria are justified based on the availability of data over time; (3) identical elements, are identical technical processes in the same region or organization that can be cut; and (4) significant and decision relevance, concerns the influence of the central company in a value chain.

The objective of this article is to support oil exploration and production operators in their assessments of social impacts related to logistics and infrastructure and employability in the onshore dimension, and in terms of the external context, restrictions on artisanal fishing activities, tourist activities, employability in the offshore dimension, involved in the decommissioning of submarine systems. To this end, life cycle thinking was used so that they can expect risks and impacts and intervene in a planned way in the solution or prediction of social situations that cause negative or positive impacts arising from the decommissioning of underwater systems for offshore oil exploration.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly reviews the analysis of the main social impact categories relating to decommissioning submarine systems. Section 3 introduces the methodological structure used in the construction of the social impact assessment model. Section 4 presents the proposed evaluation model. Section 5 presents the discussion about the model. Section 6 concludes the paper.