Oil firms cut emissions
A group of the world’s top oil companies, including Saudi Aramco, China’s CNPC and Exxon Mobil, have for the first time set goals to cut their greenhouse gas emissions as a proportion of output, as pressure on the sector’s climate stance grows.
But the target, set by the 12 members of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), means absolute emissions can rise as production increases.
It is eclipsed by more ambitious plans set individually by the consortium’s European members, including Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Total.
“It is a significant milestone, it is not the end of the work, it is a near term target . . . and we’ll keep calibrating as we go forward,” said OGCI chairman and former BP chief executive Bob Dudley.
The OGCI members agreed to reduce the average carbon intensity of their aggregated upstream oil and gas operations to between 20kg and 21kg of CO2 equivalent per barrel of oil equivalent (CO2e/boe) by 2025, from a collective baseline of 23kg CO2e/boe in 2017, the OGCI said in a statement.
The OGCI includes BP, Chevron, CNPC, Eni, Equinor, Exxon, Occidental Petroleum, Petrobras, Repsol, Saudi Aramco, Shell and Total, which together account for over 30 percent of the world’s oil and gas production. — Reuters.