Environmental stewardship

Our 13,000 employees are careful and efficient stewards of the raw materials and energy used in making and delivering petrochemicals to our customers. We are committed to monitoring our progress and continually seek to reduce our emissions and waste footprint, whether it’s in an office or a manufacturing facility.

As part of our Environmental Business Planning process, we review key environmental drivers and identify significant focus areas. Then we incorporate specific plans for those focus areas into our business plans. ExxonMobil Chemical established Environmental Engineering and Operating Standards in 1992, which set minimum environmental performance requirements for all new construction.

Review our progress on key efforts related to the following aspects of sustainability:

• Energy efficiency
• Air emissions

Energy efficiency
Addressing the risk posed by rising greenhouse gas emissions is an important issue facing our world today. Nearly all (99.9 percent on an equivalent CO2 basis) of ExxonMobil Chemical’s greenhouse gas emissions are due to energy use. In 2007/2008, we continued our efforts to reduce the amount of energy needed to produce each pound of our product. Overall, since 2000, the energy required to produce a pound of product has been reduced by more than 10 percent. Additional efforts are under way to manufacture our products while minimizing energy consumption. ExxonMobil remains on track to meet our target of improving energy efficiency across our worldwide refining and chemical operations by 10 percent between 2002 and 2012.

Air emissions  
ExxonMobil is committed to reducing the emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) from our operations. We have implemented cost-effective new technologies and adopted new operating practices to reduce air emissions.

As a result of these efforts, our combined emissions of VOCs, SO2 and NOx decreased by 25 percent from 2005 levels. By year-end 2008, we achieved more than a 50-percent reduction of our combined NOx and SO2 emissions from 2000 baseline levels at our U.S. refining facilities. We are on track to meet our commitment to achieve a 70-percent reduction compared with 2000 baseline levels by 2012.