BP beefs up carbon capture team in bid to meet climate goals
is expanding its team working on carbon capture and storage projects as part of its ambition to zero out net greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
The oil major has added staff over the past year and is reorganizing teams that have been dispersed within different units of the company, a spokesperson confirmed. The moves build on Chief Executive Officer Bernard Looney’s announcement that BP will target pollution not only from its own energy use but from the fuel its customers use.
The moves add the weight of Europe’s second-biggest oil company to efforts to make the technology a commercial reality. Carbon capture is a broad set of technologies to cut emissions from industrial plants. The goal is to bury pollutants underground instead of allowing them to essions cape into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change.
The move is an indication of BP’s ambition. While the industry burns some fossil fuel to run refineries and deliver gasoline to service stations, its largest impact on the environment is in the oil products its customers burn. Looney said carbon-capture projects will have to be part of the solution to reaching the net-zero target.
“Trillions of dollars will need to be invested in replumbing and rewiring the world’s energy system,” Looney said in a statement outlining his plan.
BP is aiming to align its emissions targets to match the ambition that governments set under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. Every climate model setting out how that goal can be reached suggests carbon capture will be essential.
The technology plays only a marginal role in cutting emisBP today, partly because each plant can cost $1 billion or more, and governments so far have been reluctant to subsidize it or put an appropriate price on carbon.
About 20 large-scale projects that can capture about 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, about 1 percent of global emissions, are working now.
BP is leading a group looking to build a zero-carbon cluster at the U.K.’s Teesside industrial complex, which includes oil refineries and chemical factories. It’s part of a project run by the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, which includes European energy majors Royal Dutch Shell and Total. The plan would be to inject carbon emissions into rock formations deep under the North Sea.
If it’s built, the Teesside project aims to capture as much as 6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, or about 2 percent of the U.K.’s annual emissions. The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative estimates the single project could create up to 4,000 jobs.
The U.K. government, which has set its own legally mandated goal of hitting net-zero emissions by 2050, is also looking to invest in carboncapture technologies.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson committed to spend $1 billion toward scaling up the technology in his party’s manifesto before the December election.