Development of an expert system for tackling the public's perception to climate-change impacts on petroleum industry

Climate change could cause significant impacts on human activities, which is especially true for regions that are of high latitude such as Canada. Petroleum industry is a main economic sector in Canada's prairie, where a number of its production and processing practices are vulnerable to the fluctuations of climatic conditions. In this study, an expert system (ES) for integrated climate-change impact assessment within the prairie's petroleum sector was developed. Interactive relationships among climate change, natural-condition variations, industrial activities, environmental concerns and economic objectives, as well as the related policy implications, were comprehensively examined and incorporated within the ES. A series of questionnaire surveys were conducted for acquiring knowledge about the interrelationships between the climate change and the petroleum-related activities. Processes that were vulnerable to climate change were analyzed, followed by an integrated impact assessment. The results indicated that the impacts of increased temperature and natural hazards would be very significant on most of the petroleum-related processes. Also, the petroleum industry would be quite sensitive to changed precipitation patterns. The developed ES can be used for both acquiring knowledge of climate-change impacts on the petroleum industry and supporting formulation of the relevant adaptation policies.