11.4.8 Dilemmas and challenges

One dilemma which companies face is the fact that sustainable water use can conflict with other environmental targets. For example, the green strategy of DSM - a chemical industry - is to reduce its fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by the deployment of white biotechnology (i.e. using agricultural products instead of fossil oil and gas to make chemicals). This presents the company with a serious dilemma; biomass-based energy requires the production of crops in the first instance. Then, growing the increased biomass necessary for industrial usage and biofuel production will require the use of additional land and water. This could bring nature, food, industry and biofuels into competition with each other. Manufacturing one litre of bio-ethanol requires four litres of process water, for instance, but growing the necessary sugar cane calls for approximately 1,000 litres. Therefore, DSM indicated that special attention needs to be paid to the potential impact of the availability of water for industrial white biotechnology. It commissioned an extensive study which examines the threats and opportunities for DSM in this area. And it will engage in further stakeholder dialogue to ensure that it puts in place the requirements for the responsible sourcing of agro feedstocks (DSM, 2007). Interesting studies about trade-offs in CSR are published in a special issue of the journal Business Strategy and the Environment (Bus. Stat. Env., 2010).

Obviously, some sectors are more challenging in terms of CSR and water. This is the case for the exploitation of oil sands, an extraction which necessitates using enormous quantities of water. Oil sands are a mixture of heavy oil and sand. If they are near the surface, they are dug up in open-pit mines. The oil is separated by using warm water. If they are deeper underground, the oil is made to flow to the surface through conventional wells, often by heating the mixture ' in situ' to make it flow (Moorehouse, 2010). Considering the rising oil price, this type of exploration is becoming profitable despite the high cost of exploitation in terms of energy and water. It is then interesting to observe how (and if) a company explains this 'challenge' in its sustainability reporting.

In its Sustainability Report 2007, Shell did mention the fact that extracting and refining oil sands into transport fuel requires a lot of water and more energy than conventional oil. For such operation, Shell said that it performed a critical assessment of the sustainability of oil sands projects, including collaboration

with NGOs (Shell, 2007).