Evaluation of Generic Types of Drilling Fluid Using a Risk-Based Analytic Hierarchy Process

The composition of drilling muds is based on a mixture of clays and additives in a base fluid. There are three generic categories of base fluid - water, oil, and synthetic. Water-based fluids (WBFs) are relatively environmentally benign, but drilling performance is better with oil-based fluids (OBFs). The oil and gas industry developed synthetic-based fluids (SBFs), such as vegetable esters, olefins, ethers, and others, which provide drilling performance comparable to OBFs, but with lower environmental and occupational health effects. The primary objective of this paper is to present a methodology to guide decision-making in the selection and evaluation of three generic types of drilling fluids using a risk-based analytic hierarchy process (AHP). In this paper a comparison of drilling fluids is made considering various activities involved in the life cycle of drilling fluids.This paper evaluates OBFs, WBFs, and SBFs based on four major impacts—operations, resources, economics, and liabilities. Four major activities—drilling, discharging offshore, loading and transporting, and disposing onshore—cause the operational impacts. Each activity involves risks related to occupational injuries (safety), general public health, environmental impact, and energy use. A multicriteria analysis strategy was used for the selection and evaluation of drilling fluids using a risk-based AHP. A four-level hierarchical structure is developed to determine the final relative scores, and the SBFs are found to be the best option.     

Employment implications of stricter pollution regulation in China: theories and lessons from the USA

While the goal of reducing environmental impact has become an urgent imperative for Chinese leadership, the central and potentially competing objective for policy makers and planners remains economic growth and job creation. This paper systematically examines the perceived trade-offs between pollution control regulation and employment at the microeconomic and macroeconomic scale. We synthesize the theoretical literature on the employment impact of pollution control regulation at the firm, industry, and economy levels and summarize the theoretically sufficient conditions for employment-enhancing regulation. The paper examines the US experience with the impact of pollution control on job growth in the 1980s and 1990s and draws out the mechanisms through which job growth and pollution control can be congruent, examining their adaptability to the Chinese context. Specifically, this paper highlights the importance of targeting regulations toward sectors where labor costs represent a small portion of overall costs or sectors with low labor intensity. We demonstrate that in the Chinese context, a transition to an economy with a higher proportion of tertiary output is likely to facilitate a joint strategy of stringent pollution control combined with job growth.