Environmental Responsibility Of Transnational Petroleum Corporations

This thesis is aimed at the study of Petroleum Corporations in "Fortune 500", a total of 36,and in accordance with the headquarter location they are divided into four regions as the United States, Europe, Japan and Korea and developing countries. On the basis of the collection of the CSR report in the last three years (2005-2007), I do some empirical analysis. Based on past CSR literature, the existing environmental management system and the disclosed information of Petroleum Corporations on CSR report, the thesis established a system of environmental indicators, which are divided into four groups: resource use, pollution emissions, oil spill and environmental costs, and comparing the raw data of CSR report with the sales revenue, making the data comparable. In the specific statistical analysis, I apply the tools of EXCEL and SPSS to do the descriptive analysis and correlation analysis. Descriptive analysis showed that the oil companies in different regions perform differently in different environments indicators, and Petroleum Corporations in same region also show distinct difference in environmental performance; and there is a wide gap between Petroleum Corporations of developing countries and developed countries in the environmental performance. There exists "double standards" between developing countries and developed countries, which is mainly reflected in the disclosure of environmental information and environmental implementation scale. Correlation analysis showed that there is some correlation between the indicators while others not. Overall, the data shows that the majority of Petroleum Corporations have improved on the performance of environmental indicators, but they still face serious challenges. Especially the poor performance of China's Petroleum companies, the disclosure of information in the environmental indicators ranks low on the industry level, which is closely related to factors such as domestic environmental legislation, the public demands and enterprises itself. I hope that through empirical research of this thesis, a realistic basis and related countermeasures can be provided to further promote the implementation of environmental responsibility of Petroleum Corporations.