Q&A With Suncor’s Chief Sustainability Officer Arlene Strom - 2023 Report on Sustainability

NORTHAMPTON, MA / ACCESSWIRE / October 4, 2023 / Suncor Energy

We broke new ground when we first began publicly reporting our sustainability performance in the mid-1990s. Twenty-eight years later, our Report on Sustainability and its companion publication, the Climate Report, continue the practice of disclosing our progress in more than a dozen areas of environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. Read more on our ESG progress in our reports here.

We sat down with Arlene to ask a few questions related to our 2022 sustainability progress and performance across the organization and here's what she had to say.

There's been a spotlight on Suncor's safety record. What steps have been taken to improve performance?

Our core value is safety above all else. That means people need to go home safely at the end of every day to their families and friends. We knew we had work to do in this area and have taken significant steps to address this issue in the past year. First and foremost, this involves frontline assurance and having leaders spend more time in the field so we understand the risks and address them. We are working to simplify our processes and policies so they are easy to access and are understandable. And we've involved our frontline workers to help identify solutions. We've also adopted a new philosophy called Human and Organizational Principles. Our focus is on continuous improvement and ensuring that if we make a mistake, we fail safely. And we've made significant investments in technologies such as the collision avoidance system we're installing in every vehicle at each of our mines as well as the fatigue management system that uses facial recognition technology to alert operators if it detects signs of drowsiness. We also identified contractor management as another critical area. We've added more structure around how many contractors are working on our sites while ensuring they have the training and tools to stay safe while performing critical work for us.

Water management has been highlighted as a critical issue for the industry. What is Suncor doing to address it?

Water management is critical to how we run our business and it's equally important to the First Nation and Métis communities who live near our operations. Water is sacred to them and intrinsic to their relationship with the Earth and each other. This is a shared issue that we need to work on together. The starting point is finding agreement on water quality and what is required for Indigenous communities to implement their treaty rights. That will help guide what steps we need to take to safely manage accumulated water and tailings on our sites. The other related challenge is minimizing our tailings inventory and reclaiming the land we've disturbed. This will require reducing the amount of water we store on our sites. We've made real progress at our Base Plant operation in reducing the amount of fresh water we take in. But we also need to manage every single drop of water that falls on our sites, whether it is rain, snow melt or run off. Storing that water slows down our ability to reclaim the land we've disturbed. Moving it around uses energy, which creates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. There are opportunities to address these challenges. For us, the starting point is working with Indigenous Peoples to find agreements on the solutions to manage water and how we reclaim the land. Finding that common ground is important as government works to finalize regulations in this area.