Pioneer believes all spills are preventable. We design, build and operate our facilities and equipment with spill prevention in mind. Our HSE Commitment, formalized in our HSE Policy, outlines how we take a proactive approach to managing spill-related risks and reducing spills. Specifically, we invest in containment equipment, conduct inspections and remote monitoring, and comply with spill preparedness and response regulations. We require the internal reporting of all environmental incidents, including spills.
See Pioneer’s Spill Management Policy for more details.
Spill Management Best Practices
Pioneer monitors performance and develops measures to prevent future incidents. We reduce spills throughout our operations by striving to:
- Improve understanding of spill causes and establish processes for reducing the frequency and spill volumes
- Promote actions that reduce our environmental footprint
- Instill incident management as a central principle for working at Pioneer
We implement these objectives by:
- Actively managing incidents consistently across the company
- Monitoring environmental incident metrics
- Setting reduction targets
- Communicating successful solutions and practices throughout the company
- Developing guidelines/procedures for proactive prevention
- Providing monthly briefings of high-risk environmental incidents, root cause investigation findings and recommendations to the HSEC
Pioneer requires the internal reporting of all environmental incidents, including spills. Our compliance specialists, operations partners and HSEC are dedicated to studying past incident findings and identifying operational or engineering safeguards that could aid in preventing future incidents. Pioneer monitors performance and develops measures to prevent future incidents. Pioneer contains spills when they do occur by:
- Recovering spill volumes, where possible, through short-term spill response activities that meet or exceed regulatory requirements
- Investing in containment equipment
- Complying with spill preparedness and response regulations
Spill Management Performance
In the event of a spill, spilled volumes are recovered, where possible, through short-term spill response activities that are designed to meet or exceed regulatory requirements. Since 2020, the number of hydrocarbon spills within our operations have increased, principally related to acquired assets. In order to reduce future spills, we are retrofitting the acquired assets to meet the standards for our operations.
Pioneer has made improvements to better understand the impact of our spills. Category selection was formerly based on the worst outcome, resulting in an exaggeration of the percentage of our spill volumes released to habitat. For instance, if even a small percentage of the spill left the facility, the entire release was categorized as having impacted habitat. Beginning in December 2021, gross spill volumes are allocated by percentage to four degrees of containment: lined containment, unlined containment, facility pad outside of containment or habitat. In 2022, 14% of liquid hydrocarbons released impacted habitat.
Our reporting improvements provide us with an opportunity to better understand the effectiveness of spill-control methods and reduce environmental risk.
Spill metrics are provided in the Sustainability Performance Data Table.