Exxon Mobil Corp and Saudi Arabian Oil Co (Saudi Aramco), the world’s largest private and state-sector oil companies, led a pledge by 50 oil and gas producers at the COP28 UN climate summit to cut emissions from their own operations.
The deal is controversial given none of the companies are agreeing to reduce oil and gas production, but they are planning to stem releases of methane, one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases, to near zero by 2030 and stop routine flaring of natural gas.
The initiative was spearheaded by COP28 president Sultan al-Jaber, the chief executive officer of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Co, who has invested political capital into bringing the oil and gas industry into the climate fight.
Photo: AP
“We must do all we can to decarbonize the energy system we have today,” he told delegates.
The pact was the centerpiece of a day that saw a deluge of other announcements, from countries vowing to boost renewable energy to a plan to tackle pollution by heavy industry. The US pledged US$3 billion in climate aid to poorer nations while the EU said it would invest 2.3 billion euros (US$2.5 billion) in the green transition overseas. The United Arab Emirates is contributing US$100 million to the methane-reduction effort.
While it was a show of force by a COP presidency keen to prove it can get things done despite questions about its climate-fighting credibility, it remains unclear how progress on all these promises would be tracked and how funding would be accessed.
The 50 members of the Oil and Gas Decarbonization Charter account for about 40 percent of global oil production. They include 29 national oil companies, marking progress in a sector that has been slow to act on methane given a lack of pressure from regulators and investors. The targets are not binding, but signatories are required to submit a plan to meet them by 2025.
Among oil companies, Shell PLC, BP PLC, TotalEnergies SE and Occidental Petroleum Corp signed up. The most notable absences were Chevron Corp and ConocoPhillips.
The list of national oil companies includes Brazil’s Petrobras, Nigeria’s Nigerian National Petroleum Corp and Kazakhstan’s KazMunayGas. China’s largest oil and gas companies have not joined.
For 31 of the companies, it was their first time making a commitment to reach net zero methane, al-Jaber said.
To some activists at COP, oil companies are little more than climate criminals, bearing much of the responsibility for the crisis of global warming. Al-Jaber said that even as fossil fuels are phased out, oil and gas would remain part of the energy system for decades to come and making them as clean as possible helps the cause.
More than 300 climate organizations from across the world published a letter strongly criticizing the effort. It urged the COP28 presidency to drop the initiative and instead focus on securing a legally binding package to phase out all fossil fuels.
“We don’t have time to waste with more pledges and initiatives with fancy names,” said Cansin Leylim Ilgaz, associate director of global campaigns at 350.org, a movement seeking to end the use of dirty fuels. “We need a fast, fair and equitable fossil fuel phaseout that does not rely on dangerous distractions.”
Exxon Mobil chief executive officer Darren Woods was among industry bosses who traveled to COP to join the charter, the first time the leader of the US’ largest oil company has appeared at a global climate summit.
Exxon has long resisted targets that would require it to cut production even as rivals such as the UK’s BP and France’s TotalEnergies have sought to align their business plans with global climate goals.
This plan is more palatable because it says nothing about how fast global oil and gas production should fall.
The signatories will also commit to almost zeroing out carbon pollution from their operations, known as scope 1 or 2 emissions, by 2050. That entirely excludes scope 3 emissions, which come from burning the fossil fuels they produce and make up the vast majority of their climate damage.
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