Oil firm resumes Libya operations

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26 September 2011 Last updated at 13:50 GMT Libya's refineries were mostly closed in March, when fighting intensified Italian oil firm Eni has restarted production at an oil field in Libya, as opponents of Col Muammar Gaddafi tighten their control on the economy.

Eni, which was the biggest foreign oil producer in Libya before Col Gaddafi was overthrown, said it planned to reopen other fields in the coming days.

Other firms, including French company Total, have also restarted operations.

Meanwhile, anti-Gaddafi forces are closing in on his hometown of Sirte, one of his few remaining strongholds.

The soldiers, loyal to the National Transitional Council (NTC), launched a surprise attack on the city on the weekend.

The BBC's Alastair Leithead, near Sirte, says the troops have the city surrounded and are preparing to enter it with significant force.

Gaddafi loyalists have been fiercely protecting the city from NTC advances in recent weeks.

Eni said in a statement it has restarted production at 15 wells in the Abu Attifel oil field, about 300km (190 miles) south of Benghazi.

Slow recovery

The company said it was pumping 31,900 barrels of oil a day, compared with a rate of 70,000 barrels a day before the unrest broke out.

The wells were closed in March amid increasing violence between Gaddafi loyalists and rebels, who later formed the NTC.

France's Total announced last week that it had resumed production at its al-Jurf offshore facility, which is capable of producing 40,000 barrels a day.

And Libya's state controlled Arabian Gulf Oil (Agoco) announced earlier this month that it had started pumping 160,000 barrels of oil from fields in the east.

The country was producing 1.6 million barrels a day before the unrest began, making up the bulk of its wealth.

Experts say it is likely to take at least a year before anything close to those levels are reached again.

The NTC still has not found Col Gaddafi, who ruled the country for more than 40 years.

But several of his children and members of his inner circle have fled abroad.

His daughter Aisha fled to Algeria, and told journalists last week that her father was in good spirits and fighting alongside his supporters.

The Algerian newspaper El-Khabar reported on Monday that a group of Gaddafi supporters, possibly including Aisha, had now left the country for Egypt.

The report has not yet been confirmed.

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How are we doing our office operations greener and poorer?

GNM offices are based at Kings place in Central London. Photograph: PR

The guardian was moved to its new headquarters in the building of King cross more than two years ago, but is only now that we have been able to begin to fully optimize the management of the construction to reduce our environmental impact.

While Kings place has a "very good" rating of environment BREEM, the same effort that was put into developing the building was not reflected in helping tenants to use the facilities of the most effective way. Experts point to the fact that it is a common problem in many new buildings.

But with the introduction of improvements to it, including smart meters, the task force has made marked improvements to optimize the Kings place construction of systems and plants to align with the use of the building.

In fact, our headquarters rather than Kings carbon emissions fell 17 per cent in the final year of March 2011. A reduction of 800tCO2 was made possible by simple low-cost or no cost changes in the way that heat, cool and light the building, along with improvements (PC power downs and server virtualization). We have finished moving all officials of London rather than Kings. As a result of our efficiency tCO2 units equivalent full time in the year ending March 2011 fell by 5% to 2.7tCO2.

While it operates on a 24/7 basis, weekends and at night there is less personal work.

Effort has therefore made optimizing space heating and cooling to coincide with the use of the occupation. For example, air conditioning has closed weekends in specific areas.

Also has been optimized to reduce the time of the phase "a" activated automatic sensors PIR, reduce levels of Lux in less sensitive areas and the lighting power. These improvements have demonstrated a 50% reduction in power and double the service life of lamps.

To ensure even more improvements, the Board of Directors approved the installation of smart meters in GNM towards the end of the last financial year after a study of the Carbon Trust estimated a saving of around 5% on energy bills.

The monitoring system will enable substantially, to identify spikes, anomalies and location of use of energy, as well as ensure proper energy re-charges our owner.

The data may also help build the business case for the grouping after hours of workers in an area of the Office, which could reduce energy use by up to 75% in these times.

Analysis of the data also showed that we had an inefficient system for the cooling of our picture and newspaper archive on the site, resulting in additional costs of ￡ 70,000 per year. A new system will be in place during the exercise course.

Currently, 48% office products are certified or recycled sources. This includes role of office stationery and supplies aboard. Also have fallen deliveries of our supplier of Office Anglo's 3 times per week to once through orders consolidated. We are planning on the work with Anglo to improve reporting of sustainability of our purchases to better understand and reduce our impact.

We have recently launched waste of his love. The new waste and scheme of recycling at the headquarters of Guardian instead of Kings.

In line with better signage, bins and clear information that we wanted to associate the idea that we value things even when us them pull.

We want staff to understand that their wastes can become, feeding back the issues main pollution and our trash through the process of waste through monitoring product or valuable product. For example, through the Global generation, one of our partners in the community, local youth of BTEC in horticulture take our canteen waste, growing food and sells to us for lunch.?The project has shown that young people what is possible.

What was the key to the campaign was the recruitment of staff and obtain views of the different and varied people in our business. This includes workshops, talks by table and using our communication channels internal. We intend to maintain the momentum through improved information, comments, and a table of the League of waste per floor. Students form Eastley school, one of our partners in the community be Kings place waste audit.

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General information: our goals of operations

GNM is intended to be a leader in sustainability in the media sector. Photograph: Rex Features

The Guardian has spent several years working to reduce the environmental impacts of their operations. As part of this work, Guardian & media developed a long-term ambition to be carbon positive. This fits in with our overall vision to be a leader in sustainability within the media industry.

In terms of our operations, carbon positive means to achieve best practices to reduce the direct and indirect environmental impacts and support social justice within the limits that we can control or influence. This includes the proper and efficient use of all resources and minimize emissions, as well as support social justice through an engagement with local communities and supply chains.

Of course, the carbon is only one of the problems we face in our operations. Therefore we also focused on other key impacts such as the consumption of resources, including water and paper, as well as creation of waste across the enterprise.

MGN plans transform into a company's first digital, which means that our impact of our production traditional newspaper will decrease over time as that will grow our digital environmental impact. For this reason, we are committed to supporting the creation of the research in this area through a number of collaborations that aim to make a real contribution to knowledge in this field.

For example, the guardian has teamed up with project Sympact, a joint research project between the universities of Surrey and Bristol to understand the environmental impacts of digital media and develop ways to reduce them.

We also have a full time research engineer embedded in the guardian for two years, which is studying the implications of sustainability of how to design digital products. This section of operations of the life of 2011 our values report provides an overview of the achievements and challenges, as well as plans for the future.

Measurement and quality data collection is vital in this area of the business if we are going to continue to improve our performance, and that is why we have a section dedicated to this. Operational activities that we cover are:

Operations of the Office

Digital operations

Printing operations

Purchases of paper

Acquisitions

Performance

The financial year ending March 2011 was successful in managing and reducing our environmental impact of the negative elements. Reduce emissions of carbon in a 27 per cent had saved 14% in water consumption, improved our recycling rate to 66% and achieved progress in our sustainable supply.

These improvements are predominantly for investment and improved management and optimisation of processes across the enterprise. Our performance has been recognized by the standard of confidence of carbon and go beyond our commitment 10: 10.

As all ambitious projects, there are also areas where we have struggled. The collection and recycling of waste in our main office, for example, has been hampered by the lack of joint reflection and the rather prosaic problem of having an election wrong Dumper. This is addressed through is love your waste project.

Also, while he moved to place of Kings, a building with high environmental standards, two years ago, there was a gap between the development of the construction and the way that works in a sustainable way in everyday life. This is a common problem caused by developers seeing their responsibilities to stop once you are given the keys. For example, has taken two years to install smart meters. However, the team focused and it came to pass in the optimization of construction systems to our patterns of use and contributed to saving energy of 17% last year.

While there is an increasing emphasis on GNM in becoming a "digital first" company, our newspapers continue to play an important role and we have made progress marked to limit the environmental impacts of our purchase of stationery and printing sites.

Print sustainability Center is all about efficiency and our Manchester and Stratford plants have seen reductions in energy, natural resources and hazardous materials through a systematic approach for monitoring, planning, testing and implementation.

In the past year, 96% of newspapers and 82 per cent of grade magazine paper used for the guardian and the observer was recycled or certified virgin fiber used.

As the documents to go from being mostly around breaking news for coverage issues further, paging will continue to reduce even further.

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