How to Evaluate Environmental Impact Assessments for Oil and Gas Projects

This guidebook aims to provide public interest environmental advocates and the communities they represent with sufficient understanding to challenge oil and gas projects that are unacceptable from an environmental or social perspective.

This guidebook builds on several other resources available for evaluating EIAs for oil and gas projects. However, these other resources are either out-of-date or limited in scope, omitting discussion of critical issues, such as the climate impacts of oil and gas projects, especially within the evolving framework of international commitments to limit global warming.

This guidebook aims to be comprehensive in scope. Oil and gas projects can be categorized by stage of development — exploration versus production phase; and by location — onshore versus offshore. Different categories of oil and gas projects have distinct environmental and social aspects that warrant separate discussions. This guidebook aims to encompass all four major upstream categories of oil and gas projects: 1) onshore oil and gas exploration projects; 2) offshore oil and gas exploration projects; 3) onshore oil and gas production projects; and 4) offshore oil and gas production projects.

This guidebook is organized in the following manner:

• Chapter 1 provides a discussion of the EIA process, describing its intended purpose and key stages;

• Chapter 2 identifies and discusses the potential environmental and social impacts of the four categories of oil and gas projects, illustrating technical details that are essential to understanding the impacts that oil and gas projects can cause; and

• Chapter 3 provides a guide to reviewing the adequacy of EIAs for oil and gas projects by focusing on expected data and analyses found in the following sections of EIAs: the project description, the environmental and social baseline, assessment of impacts, proposed mitigation measures, and proposed financial assurances.

This project has been made possible by the generous support of the Leo Model Foundation.