Le sfide ambientali per il settore petrolifero

Oil has been and will continue to be indispensable to assure the growth of the world economy, but it is also responsible to have an impact on the environment. One of the most important challenges for the future, in particular for the oil sector, is to make this growth sustainable for the environment. To do this, refineries must plan a huge amount of investments for the next future to modify substantially their industrial structures to reformulate transportation fuels (diesel and gasoline), to comply the new limits for the emissions generated during the production and distribution of oil products and to apply new safety rules in order to improve the compatibility of the refineries with the territory. To fulfil all this actions the oil sector will have to face very high costs without any certainty of the return of investments, due to the extreme uncertainty to forecast the future oil demand in Italy after the Kyoto Protocol. To be ready within the year 2005, Italian refineries must decide now to invest, but they are not sure to have a market in the future for the products that they are going to produce.