BP moves to limit carbon emissions
BP said Monday that it will hold greenhouse gas emissions from its operations at or below its 2015 levels in the years ahead as the world’s biggest oil companies prepare for a lower carbon future that could threaten their businesses.
The British oil major released an “Advancing the Energy Transition” report that detailed its plans to reduce its pollution levels, especially its emissions of methane, the main component of natural gas and a potent greenhouse gas. Controlling methane emissions, which escape from wells and pipelines, is gaining more attention in the energy sector as BP and other companies shift investments to cleanerburning natural gas from crude oil.
Other Big Oil companies, including Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell, have taken increasingly public stances on the need to fight climate change and lessen their carbon footprints — with-
out abandoning fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels, such as oil, gas and coal, is one of the main sources of carbon dioxide, which traps heat in the earth’s atmosphere and raises global temperatures in a phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect. Shell last week released its own transition report, which includes a goal of cutting the Anglo-Dutch company’s carbon emissions in half by 2050.
Bob Dudley, BP’s chief executive, said his company embraces the “dual challenge” of providing more energy to the world’s growing population while working to reduce carbon emissions to help combat global warming and rising sea levels. While BP isn’t switching its primary focus to renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, BP in December said it would invest $200 million for a minority stake in British solar developer Lightsource.
“We now know that a race to renewables will not be enough,” Dudley said. “To deliver significantly lower emissions every type of energy needs to be cleaner and better.”
BP said has embraced the “zero net emissions growth” goal to keep its global emissions levels at or below its 2015 levels through 2025, and then working to further lower its emissions afterward. The aim is to reduce its carbon emissions by the equivalent of 3.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2025.
While natural gas burns cleaner than oil, the challenge is ensuring that methane doesn’t leak during the drilling and production of gas. Those emissions are viewed as the Achilles’ heel of natural gas. So BP is setting a target of keeping its methane emissions down to 0.2 percent of the gas produced.
Call to expand effort
Ben Ratner, a director with the Environmental Defense Fund, said BP is making progress but must go further to cut emissions beyond natural gas production, such as from oil refining and petrochemical production.
“The stringency and immediacy of BP’s initial methane target is constructive,” Ratner said. “However, going forward, it is necessary that BP expand coverage by including emissions from all oil and gas activities.”
Other companies are taking steps as well. Exxon Mobil said last fall that it’s implementing a methane emissions reduction program and will phase out much of its natural gaspowered equipment over three years. The equipment, which emits methane, controls valves and pressure levels.
Exxon Mobil and Shell are both under scrutiny for climate change research they conducted in the 1980s. That research acknowledged the threats of climate change and the role played by fossil fuels, but the companies didn’t immediately act on the concerns or make the data public. Exxon, which is under investigation by two states over whether it misled investors and the public, has denied allegations that it knew about the climate repercussions of its business in the 1980s but hid the evidence.
Shell’s climate change research from the 1980s was recently revealed by a European news website that obtained and released internal Shell documents. Shell has not denied that it had early knowledge of the effects of fossil fuels on global warming or the authenticity of the documents. The company said its position on climate change has been a matter of public record for decades.
In recent years, companies like Shell have raised alarms about climate change. Shell has made a larger public show of promoting the Paris climate accord and the company’s plan to dramatically reduce its dependence on crude oil for corporate profits. Shell supports a potential “sky scenario” that envisions the world achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2070 to keep global temperatures from rising above 2 degrees Celsius, the target set by the Paris accord.
After Gulf disaster
As for BP, it previously invested billions of dollars in renewable energy, including solar and wind and adopted the “Beyond Petroleum” slogan. But that all tragically fell apart in the aftermath of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster that killed 11 workers and resulted in a threemonth discharge of nearly 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana. The aftermath also left BP’s finances in tatters.
After selling off much of its green portfolio, BP is again looking at alternatives. BP maintained a wind division and now has the Lightsource investment.