Canada’s Nexen, Inc. Sets the ‘Tone at the Top’ When it Comes to Business Ethics, Ethikos Reports

MAMARONECK, N.Y., Jan. 27 /PRNewswire/ — Nexen, Inc. plies its trade in some of the world’s wilder locales. The Canadian firm runs oil and gas operations — including offshore oil drilling platforms — in the North Sea, West Africa, the Middle East, the Gulf of Mexico, and the tar sands of Northeastern Alberta, among other places.

This presents certain challenges. In early 2007, Nexen began a new oil platform operation in the Buzzard Field in the North Sea. This was to be a “showcase” facility for the company, Canada’s fourth largest independent oil producer and explorer, the publication Ethikos (www.EthikosJournal.com) reports in its January/February issue.

By November 2007, the facility was producing 200,000 barrels of oil a day. But then a huge storm struck the platform, damaging the upper section of one of its three power generation turbine exhaust stacks.

Nexen probably could have continued to run the operation with two turbines. The company was under pressure to keep the facility running. Analysts, among others, were watching closely how the energy concern — relatively small with about 4,500 employees world wide — was managing the North Sea project. “There was a real desire to run it continuously,” Eric Miller, the company’s chief legal officer, tells Ethikos. Yet the damage had put worker safety at risk.

“Management in the UK just shut it down,” recalls Miller. “To step back and shut it down and evacuate the platform was not an easy decision.”

The incident reinforces one of the company’s key principles, however: “It is not business at any cost,” says Miller. Workers’ health and safety really do matter at the firm. (In the event, the platform was repaired fairly quickly.)

This incident, in Miller’s view, offers a clear example of how Nexen sets the “tone at the top” when it comes to health and safety issues — and ethics issues generally.

Nexen, Inc. is the subject of a business ethics profile in current issue of Ethikos (http://ethikosjournal.com/html/nexen.html), a publication that examines ethical issues in business.

In its 22nd year, Ethikos takes a unique case-study approach to corporate ethics programs. Recent issues have included profiles of Cisco, General Motors, L’Oreal, and Toyota, among others.

www.ethikosjournal.com

SOURCE Ethikos