Corporate Responsibility

Our Corporate Responsibility

ARC takes its commitment to corporate responsibility seriously. Since our inception, we have always placed a high value on best practices in health, safety and environmental management. We subscribe to ethical business and labour practices and we passionately believe in contributing to the well-being of our communities and the economy at large through investments, supply of jobs and support for various not-for-profit agencies. Although we have physically demonstrated our commitments in these areas, we have not documented our success and goals for improvement in a disclosure document. We believe that it is important to begin to formally communicate our core beliefs and initiatives in the areas of health, safety and environment; our interaction with communities; and, our contributions and involvement in the Canadian economy.

Traditionally, only very large corporations compile these reports, however, ARC believes in being a leader within its peer group and as such, we are amongst the first in the trust sector to publish a comprehensive corporate responsibility report. Our goal in publishing this type of information is to communicate openly with our employees and other stakeholders and to be transparent in our business practices. This report will help us track and guide our performance of non-financial metrics (including greenhouse gases and workforce profile, among others) as we continue to strive for best-in-class results throughout our business operations. It allows us to communicate our successes and confront our deficiencies on important issues that fall outside of our normal financial performance. Addressing investor, employee, and stakeholder demands is an evolving process, and we believe that with the release of ARC’s Corporate Responsibility report we are taking a step in the right direction.

Download the ARC Corporate Responsibility Report (PDF)

History of Responsibility at ARC

It takes a lot of time, integrity, effort, and diligence to build a responsible and successful company. That is why ARC began with and has maintained strong values since inception in 1996. We have always believed in doing what is right, not just what is required. Although this is the first time we have reported on our non-financial initiatives and performance, we have a proud history of responsible operations and governance.

Highlights of our proactive business practices from the years that precede this reporting period include:

• Right from inception one of our core beliefs has been involvement with communities, both from the corporate perspective and also supporting employees to contribute financially or through volunteerism
• In 1996, ARC established a general reclamation fund, which has been used for reclaiming disturbed and contaminated lands throughout our asset portfolio. In 2006, we established an additional reclamation fund, specifically for our newly acquired Redwater properties
• 2000 marked ARC’s first year of reporting our greenhouse gas emissions and management plans to the Voluntary Climate Registry. We received a Leadership Award for the Upstream Oil & Gas sector that year. Continued voluntary reporting to the Canadian Greenhouse Gas Registries, along with the CAPP Stewardship program, and now also the Carbon Disclosure Project, helps us measure and manage our environmental performance
• In 2002, ARC acquired assets in southeast Saskatchewan that were wasting resources by flaring solution gas. To rectify the situation we built a solution gas plant in our Lougheed field and tied in gas production from the battery for processing, which reduced flaring and related air emissions
• In 2004, the ARC Board of Directors established the Health, Safety and Environment (HSE) Committee to focus more Board attention on HSE and climate change issues
• We acquired properties in Pembina and Redwater in 2005. This strategic move committed ARC to enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and has focused attention and resources on carbon capture and storage
• In 2007 ARC was proud to be the newest addition to the JANTZI SOCIAL INDEX. “The JSI, a socially screened, market capitalization-weighted common stock index modeled on the S&P/TSX 60 consists of 60 Canadian companies that pass a set of broadly based environmental, social, and governance rating criteria. The JSI has begun to generate the first definitive data on the effects of social screening on financial performance in Canada.”
• Since our inception we have positively affected the economy, spending $1.7 billion on capital projects, $1.2 billion on operating activities and paying $1.3 billion in royalties, and $2.7 billion to our unitholders in distributions