RIASSUNTO
Abstract
Social Licence to Operate - non-technical risk in new field development.
The term Social Licence to Operate describes broad public acceptance of a proposed development and winning this licence and maintaining it, requires that the Non-Technical Risks (NTR) associated with a project be addressed effectively as regarded by the many stakeholders involved including the community at large. NTR is a phrase increasingly used in the energy industry to refer to the commercial impacts of issues such as health, safety, environment and community performance. Non-Technical Risk can impact a capital project in many different ways, most commonly through significant project delays, cost and schedule overruns, and in some extreme cases, the inability to develop fields or assets, all of which result in direct erosion of Net Present Value (NPV). While these topics have been clearly on the radar for years, their importance as core business challenges is only recently coming into sharp focus. ERM has conducted research on causes of delay or failure of over 100 of capital projects by major companies in the oil and gas and mining industries and this paper will share the results of this research in terms of root causes (as may relate to social and environmental effects) and possible ways of combatting these early in the process. Accounting for non-technical risks in the same way that any other technical risk is analysed can help plan the management of these non-technical issues that will prevent those risks becoming problems later in the lifecycle of the project. With the appropriate skills, approaches, tools and data, these risks can be characterised, reasonably well quantified and managed as robustly as any other business risk. Indeed addressing these types of risks holistically can bring competitive advantage and this paper presents insights as to how this can be achieved.