<p>In 2013, oil companies in Alberta, Canada invested $32 billion in new oil-sands projects.  Despite the size of this investment, there is a demonstrable deficiency in the uniformity and understanding of environmental legislation requirements that translate into increased project compliance risks. In this paper, we applied the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to develop a priority list of environmental regulatory compliance risk criteria for oil-sands projects.  AHP belongs to the family of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques that utilizes a pairwise comparison matrix solicited from subject matter experts (SMEs) in the field as input.  The overall methodology itself consisted of 4 phases: (1) identification of the initial list of N potential environmental compliance risk criteria and verification of these criteria via a pilot survey; (2) formation of a pairwise comparison survey in the form of an N(N-1)/2 comparison matrix based on the verified criteria; (3) administration of the pairwise comparison matrix to a sample of 16 industry-specific SME’s; and (4) the application of the AHP method using SuperDecisions as a tool on the collected sample to rank the identified risk criteria. Our demonstrated results can potentially inform Alberta oil sands industry leaders about the ranking and utility of specific compliance risks as understood by experts and enable a more focused environmental compliance action to help increase legislative and public trust.</p>

Oil companies in Alberta, Canada, have spent more than $15 billion in 2013 on new oil-sands projects. There is demonstrable deficiency in the uniformity and understanding of environmental legislation requirements, which can lead to environmental damage. The purpose of this quantitative study is to develop a prioritized list of environmental regulatory compliance risk factors and mitigation strategies for oil-sands projects using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The multicriteria decision-making process using expert input is the basis for the study's theoretical foundation. The quantitative descriptive design consists of 3 phases: (a) the identification of the potential environmental compliance risk factors and mitigation strategies using the Alberta Energy Regulator (ERCB) database; (b) the formation and administration of a pilot study followed by a specialized survey on a sample of 15 industry-specific subject matter experts (SMEs) to provide their individual pairwise priorities among the identified risk factors and mitigations strategies; and (c) the application of the AHP, using SuperDecisions, on the collected sample to rank each of the risk factors and mitigation strategies. Enabling the Alberta oil companies' leaders to gain additional legislative and public trust through demonstrating improvements to their environmental risk management practices can make social-economic change possible. Knowing not only the environmental risk factors but also understanding the ranking of these factors will help oil companies completing sustainable oil sands projects in compliance with the local regulator's requirements.