This introductory blog post is the first part of a series that is themed heavily around “thinking past the end of a project” with an inspirational implementation of that idea.
If you have been following People, Planet, Profits, and Projects, or if you have read Green Project Management or its follow up book, Driving Sustainability Success, or you have any sense of what ‘sustainability in project management’ really means, you know that it is not only about projects to build wind farms and solar panels. It is about integrating a thoughtful, holistic, responsible, long-term view into planning and executing projects, which, we like to say, means “thinking past the end of the project”, even to that point in time when the product of your project is (for lack of better words) dead, useless, kaput, “finito”, over-and-done-with.
We don’t like to think that way, do we? As project managers, we think about the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the celebratory party, the congratulations-on-a-project-well-executed, and we want to begin working on our next project. It’s in our blood, our DNA, to get things done. And we see “done” as that time when that black diamond milestone that says “END” has passed.
Let’s say your project is an oil rig. Or, perhaps it’s a drilling project based on an oil rig.
Should you be thinking about what happens to the rig when it is no longer useful? After all, an oil rig, at some point, reaches its end of useful life. It then has to be decommissioned.
A primer on the Waste Hierarchy
All of us, I’m sure, have heard the phrase, “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”. And many of us do a good job living our lives with that mantra. But not everyone is aware that there is a certain precedence to these different ways of reducing impact on the environment, or even that those are not the only three ways to do so.
There are several version of this, but I prefer the one below (see image). It involves not three, but six ways of dealing with waste (whether that’s the plastic beverage bottle you from the iced tea you just finished while reading this, or an unusable oil rig). From Zero Waste Europe comes the Waste Hierarchy shown below.waswaswwaswwdd
At the top, you see “Refuse/Rethink/Redesign”, which, in the case of the oil rig, would mean moving away from carbon-based energy. That’s a non-starter for the existing 12,000+ oil rigs already out there. So let’s drop down a level and look at Reduce and Reuse. That’s where we are. Although it doesn’t say “repurpose” that’s what we’re going to discuss here – giving a new use to an oil rig – a new purpose. Note that Recycle is further down on the hierarchy. In fact, as we’ll dive into (excuse the pun) later, the recycling of materials from an oil rig is exceedingly costly, from both an economic and ecological perspective.
To summarize, we want you to think past the end of the project. Designing, deploying, and drilling from an oil rig – all are projects.
Let’s look at some statistics. Already mentioned are the 12,000+ oil rigs in the Earth’s oceans. It costs about US$50M to decommission each oil rig.
However, it costs about US$1M to repurpose them to become artificial reefs.
And that is where we have a whole bunch of new projects to consider: repurposing these defunct oil rigs to become reef habitats.
A January 2021 article in BBC Future is what sent me down this path, and it features two marine scientists, Emily Hazelwood and Amber Sparks, based in California, who founded an organization in 2015 called Blue Latitudes. Their mission: to find silver linings in our oceans at the intersection of industry and the environment. We unite science, policy, and communications to create innovative solutions for the complex ecological challenges associated with offshore industry.
In this introductory post, we just want to stress the importance of looking past (and thinking through) the end of your project by having you watch this visually stunning and engaging 38-minute video that will prepare you for the following posts. To understand the title, know that a transect is a method consisting of a field survey performed with a video-camera along a line of fixed length, with the registered images further analyzed using a computer.
Really. Don’t skip this.Watch it. Watch it to be entertained by the amazing and quite beautiful underwater photography, and watch it from the perspective of a project manager (which you probably cannot help doing!). Make sure you watch for a key statistic at the end which compares a natural reef's ability to support a habitat for fish and coral with the same ability for a repurposed oil rig. The statistic will probably surprise you!
We would like you to also consider some of the controversy here – it plays well into our role as PMs to consider multiple stakeholder views. Some environmental groups think this repurposing is actually counterproductive because it encourages more drilling. Some think this is an elegant solution for the existing oil rigs and should be pursued extensively. I will discuss that in the follow-up posts, and will also discuss how government (another stakeholder!) is playing a role.
But for now, we would like to build your interest in this initiative because it is so intertwined with our discipline of PM, and helps make the point that sustainability is not an afterthought, or even a forethought – it needs to be integrated into our PM mindset.
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