Bill Streever: Making a difference from inside BP

Bestselling author of “Cold” wants to see more ecologists in oil companies

BY KAY CASHMAN FOR GREENING OF OIL

He wanted to be a scientist until he was 13 years old. As a teenage boy, the life of a deep sea diver looked more exciting. When he first entered college he wanted to be a writer.

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Twenty years later Bill Streever has become all three.

Today, in his mid-40s, he leads a life young men dream of.

He is at the top of his field as an ecologist with BP, the author of several books, including the 2009 bestseller “Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places,” and he is still diving, but for his own enjoyment, when and where he chooses.

He dives, hikes, camps, skis, snowshoes, bikes and travels extensively, both for work and pleasure.

And his life includes those elements that give life meaning: a lovely and intelligent life partner, Lisanne, who is also a biologist and shares many of his interests; a 13-year-old-son, Ishmael, he is exceedingly proud of; and a dog named Lucky, who Lisanne found living on the streets in Sakhalin, Russia, and brought home to Alaska.

Eight years-plus as a commercial diver

Streever’s professional life began when he left high school to become a commercial diver in the harbors of Maine. When he turned 18, the legal age for a commercial diver, he began diving in oil fields—four years in the Gulf of Mexico and four years in the South China Sea.

But in the 1970s and ’80s injuries were common among divers and Streever had his share of them; plus the life of a diver wasn’t an easy one.

“It’s a tough lifestyle,” Streever told Greening of Oil in a recent interview. “I was offshore six to nine months of the year. I’d pretty much done everything I set out to do as a commercial diver,” he said, referring to the depth of dives. “... I decided it was time to go back to school, to go to college.”

He enrolled in a creative writing program, but “very quickly realized” that wasn’t what he wanted, so he switched to biology and became a biologist.

Later, with a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, he compared natural wetlands and wetlands created on phosphate-mined lands, a project that led to a doctorate in applied ecology from the University of Florida.

Next, Streever moved to Australia, going to work as an assistant professor at the University of Newcastle, where he developed a broad research program linked to the Kooragang Wetland Rehabilitation Project.

He returned to the United States where he conducted wetlands restoration research throughout the country for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, research that eventually led him to Alaska and a job with the Alaska subsidiary of London-based BP.

Going to work for ‘Big Oil’

That was 10 years ago.

Today Streever runs BP’s environmental program on the North Slope of Alaska, his official title environmental studies program director. That’s 50 percent of his job. The other half is a global position, his title underwater sound and marine mammal program technical manager.

In his Alaska position, he said he directs “several million dollars worth of studies on the North Slope, on topics ranging from fish in the near-shore Beaufort Sea—30 years of data, making this one of the longest running datasets on fish in the Beaufort Sea—to birds,” where we are “looking at number of nests and nest success for species that nest on the tundra, to habitat restoration—70-plus sites that we monitor for restoration progress.”

One of Streever’s “North Slope studies is the Northstar bowhead whale study, that looks at the reaction of migrating bowhead whales to underwater sounds from Northstar (oil field), which are relatively low level sounds.”

In the global marine mammal program position, “we are setting up a reasonably large program focused on improving our ability to mitigate for potential impacts from sound, to better understand our sounds, and to find ways to decrease our sounds.”

Streever also chairs the North Slope Science Initiative’s Science Technical Advisory Panel in Alaska and serves on many related committees, including a climate change advisory panel.

He has had three books published and authored, or co-authored, more than 50 technical publications on topics ranging from plant competition to the
evolution of cave organisms to environmental economics.

But when he first took a job in 2000 with BP, 2000 friends, “friends of friends,” academics, students, and people he barely knew asked him why he had “sold out” and gone to work for Big Oil. Why would someone like him go to work for an oil company?

“I told them then, and I still tell them, you can make a difference, influence company policy, from within an oil company, more so than working from the outside,” Streever said.

Working from the outside has its role, he acknowledged, “but in my opinion you can actually, hands on, make a difference that you can see, working within an oil company, as an adviser” to the people who make the decisions that matter to people concerned about the environment.

“There are a lot of cynical people out there who think the bosses at BP tell me what to do. But in reality, they aren’t biologists. … They hired me to advise them, to help them understand the situation, to help them make decisions.”

Streever said “without exception” no one at BP has “ever told me ‘this is where we are going to come down on an issue,’” and ignored his advice.

Why working for an oil company is important

Streever acknowledged that working for an oil company is not a popular choice for employment among newly graduated biologists (ecology is a branch of biology) or those who are changing jobs at midcareer—a fact he called a “tragedy” in an editorial he wrote in 2005, and “lamentable” in his recent interview with Greening of Oil.

According to Streever, there is a need for well-informed biologists in industry, a need that increases every year as the world population grows and, along with it, the demand for more energy and better environmental performance from energy producers.

The tragedy of not enough biologists looking at industry as a career path can be fixed, Streever said, by a simple change in the attitude of academics and students.

“Rather than assuming that jobs in industry are inherently tainted, academics should look closely at how leading companies approach ecological stewardship and how they deal with environmental impacts,” he wrote in his 2005 editorial.

“Resist the temptation to assume all corporate environmental stewardship is ‘greenwash’” and make an attempt to understand the factors that “motivate companies to work towards improved practices.”

Students, he wrote, should study the “principles of triple bottom line management—managing for profit, environmental performance and social performance—and then try to find companies that have moved in this direction.”

“Where I work, at BP, upper management openly supports environmental stewardship and innovation. That’s not true of all companies,” Streever told Greening of Oil.

Has resources that academic, government scientists do not

One of the reasons Streever believes he has been able to make a difference at BP is that he has access to top level managers, the people in charge of the programs that impact the environment.

Another reason is that he has the resources to work on many different issues.

“If I see a problem related to the environment,” he said, “I don’t have to find a grant to match it, like academic and government scientists do. I can almost always find the funds within the company to address the issue.”

And if Streever wants to tackle issues outside his own area of expertise, he can bring in experts.

For example, when a Native community on Alaska’s North Slope expressed concern about industry noise affecting whale behavior in the Beaufort Sea, he brought in some of the best people in their fields to conduct research and analyses, including a world-renowned marine mammal ecologist, who had been measuring underwater sound in the area for almost 40 years.

But a corporate philosophy that supports environmental stewardship “does not mean that every proposed environmental action is adopted, but it does mean that such suggestions have an audience,” Streever pointed out in his editorial.

Experience in the industry important

The experience he got working as a diver in the oil and gas industry helped Streever understand the motivations of oil companies, which are for-profit entities with a legal responsibility to make money for their shareholders.

“To intelligently advise employees in the oil and gas industry, you first have to understand it,” he said. “You have to understand how oil fields work.”

“Experience in some aspect of the industry is important versus just going to work for an oil company as a biologist right out of college. … Today, in my day-to-day job, my experience as a diver has proven to be one of the most valuable parts of my education,” he said, advising students to also take courses in petroleum engineering and business before they graduate.

An ‘average’ work day at BP

So, what does an average work day consist of for Streever, who spends half his time in Alaska and the other half working “globally” on industry offshore noise issues that impact marine life?

“The only possible response is, ‘there is no average day.’ … On a real-time basis I like field days best, and all the experiences that go on in the field. … These days, unfortunately, (as BP’s lead environmental scientist in Alaska) only 10-15 percent of my time is spent in the field.”

But even though the fast-paced environment of a major oil company can be stressful, “in terms of getting things done, in terms of accomplishments and making a difference regarding company policy, the rewards come from my time in the office,” he said.

Streever’s days in Anchorage, BP’s Alaska headquarters, consist of “reviewing reports” from other scientists and stakeholders, “writing reports, editing reports” and “lots of meetings in between.”

In addition to “doing the science while I am in the field I spend a lot of time listening to local stakeholders’ concerns, so that I can take them back to the office, to the internal stakeholders, which are BP’s employees and contractors,” he said.

“The BP staff, the BP workers and the contractors often don’t understand why we outlaw certain activities on the tundra and why we’re worried about polar bears and ice roads. They have to cooperate with our requirements … such as re-routing ice roads around polar bear dens. It’s important they understand why.”

Stakeholders on the North Slope include villagers, whalers, Native corporations and local government officials and agencies. Outside the North Slope stakeholders include state and federal government agencies and the general public.

So what does Streever see in cold?

Streever loves working and playing in Alaska. He even prefers diving in the icy cold waters off the northernmost state in the Union to his diving vacations in the Dutch Antilles and Socorro, Mexico, which is about 250 miles south of the tip of Baja, Calif.

So what gives him the most joy in the frozen north?

Waking up on a winter morning, walking outside, still a bit sleepy, and getting slammed by the cold.

“It gives you a sense of feeling alive,” he said. … “It’s better than a strong cup of coffee.”

Watch for Streever’s next book, “Heat,” which will be set in Alaska and, “just to keep things lively, will include some fire-walking.”

Links of interest

Articles about Streever’s work in the Arctic:

Liberty seismic targets drilling corridor,

Oil industry, regulators join forces on slope, convert mines into fish, waterfowl habitat

Bill Streever’s Web site

Kay Cashman’s review of “Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places”

Mary Roach, New York Times Book Review, July 2009

The Washington Post book review: Where the Weather Outside Is Frightful, August 2009

Polar Bears International

Contact Kay Cashman at publisher@greeningofoil.com