Syncrude’s Vision and Values
Syncrude is securing Canada’s energy future with the vision to lead, the knowledge to succeed, the commitment to do better and the heart to win the race.
We will do this by encouraging learning and innovation in everything we do, pushing the limits of what technology can accomplish and working together to make Syncrude the best place to work.
In this way, we will be safe, reliable and profitable, and all of our stakeholders will want to invest in our future.
To achieve our vision, we:
- are safe, reliable and profitable
- create our own future
- realize our potential
- respect competence and value contribution
- have the courage and conviction to do what is right
- interact with care, honesty and respect
- are a participative organization
- continuously improve
Pictured above, left to right:
Marcel Coutu
Chairman
Charles Ruigrok
Chief Executive Officer
Jim Carter
President and Chief Operating Officer
Letter from Syncrude’s Leaders
focused on what matters – As the opening pages of this
fifth edition of our Sustainability Report suggest, Syncrude stewards
to a few key areas of focus. Taken together, they comprise what
we value most: a commitment to sustainability as evidenced by a
healthy business, healthy communities and a healthy environment.
As a large business organization with a large and broad
impact, and as a pioneer and a leader in the oil sands industry,
we acknowledge and welcome the responsibility to achieve
results in these focus areas: to devote all of our efforts and abilities
to sustaining the business on behalf of our employees and owners,
to supporting and serving our communities, and to protecting
and preserving the environment. Our Sustainability Report is one
of the key ways we communicate our progress on these fronts
with all of our stakeholders.
Increased production
The year 2006 was, in many respects, a landmark one. We completed the Stage 3 expansion of our Syncrude 21 suite of investments and reinforced our position as the industryâs leading producer. We surpassed a cumulative billion dollars in spending with Aboriginal businesses. And we made major strides in reclaiming the land, managing our water use, and setting the stage for significant reductions in our air emissions.
The Stage 3 expansion increases Syncrudeâs production capacity to 128 million barrels per year of our signature Syncrude Sweet Blend crude oil. Working toward that capacity, we set a new production record of 94.3 million barrels of crude oil in 2006, an increase of 21 per cent over the previous year, based in part on improved reliability and throughput rates in our base plant operations. Impressive as it was, the result was still below our expectations; production was hampered by the temporary shutdown of the new flue gas desulphurization unit and associated Stage 3 units to address start-up odour issues. The problems were addressed and the situation ultimately affirmed the effectiveness of our stakeholder engagement and incident management processes. We expect to more fully realize the benefits of a three coker operation next year as we maximize the significant value of our new assets.
Continuous improvement
Innovation and technology remain key drivers behind our business, and these and other advances are the result of Syncrudeâs ongoing commitment to continuous improvement across all aspects of the operation. We aim to stay at the forefront of oil sands research, and profitable, sustainable resource development. To support our efforts to capture further improvements, Syncrude signed a Management Services Agreement with Imperial Oil in late 2006. Under this agreement, Imperial and its affiliate ExxonMobil will provide guidance and support on management, operational, technical, and other business matters. It will allow Syncrude to adopt global best practices in such areas as maintenance and reliability, energy management, procurement, and environment, health, and safety. We look forward to sharing information about the implementation of this Agreement in our 2007 Sustainability Report.
A zero-injury culture
In the area of safety performance, in 2006 our combined lost-time injury rate, while still among the best in industry, increased to 0.15 per hundred person years worked from 0.05 the year before. Our objective remains one of an incident-free workplace and our efforts to achieve this goal must continue. There was a bright spot in 2006: performance on the UE-1 expansion was world-class with an LTI of 0.06 for every hundred person years worked.
Controls and conduct
In the area of business controls, we made substantial progress toward completing our new Controls Integrity Management System which, among other objectives, is meant to help bring about greater efficiencies and cost savings. We have also established a process of objective self-assessment to help us identify gaps and potential problem areas before they escalate to something more significant, thereby providing another effective risk management tool that helps assure the overall integrity of our operation.
In 2006, our employees formally reviewed our ethical conduct policies and practices, and have declared all potential conflicts of interest. New ethics and business conduct review and reporting mechanisms were also introduced over the year.
Economic opportunity and benefits
One of the beneficial outcomes of a constantly improved business operation is the sustainability of economic opportunity. Our annual economic contribution in the form of royalties, salaries, procurement expenditures, and other payments has averaged $4.1 billion over the last five years and came in at $4.2 billion in 2006. Since start-up in 1978, Syncrude has made payments of more than $7.5 billion to governments for royalties, payroll and municipal taxes, and other Crown charges. We paid nearly a billion dollars in 2006 alone, in large part because we reached the end of the minimum royalty period we were under while our expansion was under construction.
Employment, of course, is another important economic benefit generated by our business operations. Our people themselves are behind everything we do and all we create. Hiring almost 750 new employees over the year, we ended 2006 more than 4,500 strong. We expect to continue an aggressive recruiting effort in 2007, and to sustain our efforts to attract and retain the skilled workforce we need by ensuring we remain the employer of choice.
The Aboriginal contribution
Among many other contributions to the oil sands industry, Aboriginal people, too, are an important source of supply, business expertise, and employment. At year-end, we employed 420 Aboriginal people directly and did $132 million in business with Aboriginal-owned firms, bringing the cumulative total spent over the last 15 years to more than $1 billion. We also take an active role advocating for inclusion and development on a provincial and national stage, with some recent signs in western Canada of increasing degrees of economic and social parity. To sustain these mutually beneficial outcomes into the foreseeable future, a variety of programs and other initiatives are in place to foster continued participation of Aboriginal people in our business including the Fort Chipewyan Employment Program and various student employment, scholarship, and award programs. We also remain involved in a variety of partnership-based community and environmental development activities.
For example, we invested nearly a million dollars in Aboriginal community projects in 2006. We also invested more than $4 million in communities at large through our community investment program, a significant increase over 2005. Overall, we remain committed to conscientious citizenship and to being a responsible, reliable neighbour.
Environmental stewardship
Part of that commitment is represented, in turn, by our environmental stewardship. As with all other areas of our operation, our fundamental goal is continuous improvement in reducing our impacts on the land, water, and air.
Our performance in energy management and air emissions in 2006, however, did not meet our expectations in several instances. The challenge was, in part, the result of learning curves associated with the Stage 3 expansion assets. Performance is expected to improve in the years ahead. Future capital spending, for example, is focused on the $772-million Syncrude Emissions Reduction Project which, when combined with benefits from Stage 3 units, should reduce emissions of sulphur dioxide by 60 per cent and particulate emissions by at least 50 per cent from 2005 levels when it is fully operational in 2011.
We take pride in our responsible land and water use. Nearly a quarter of the land we have disturbed since mining began has been reclaimed. Our cumulative reclamation efforts at our Mildred Lake site now exceed our disturbance rate, and remarkable progress has been made at Aurora. As for water, we remain the oil sands industryâs most efficient user of Athabasca River water and research continues to improve our efficiency even further.
As oil sands pioneers we have been witness over many years to varying levels of public interest in what we do and, clearly, that interest has never been higher than it is now. A record number of job candidates expressed a desire to work with us in 2006, for example, and our many stakeholder engagement activities indicate a growing awareness and knowledge of our operation. We have long sought and welcome this attention, whether supportive or to express concerns. Sustainability is, after all, a collective journey marked by introspection, teamwork, and a continuous search for better ways of doing things. Informed feedback and constructive, broadly-based participation serves that process incredibly well and helps assure that what we and our stakeholders value, will continue to govern our actions in the years ahead.
