Europe’s top oil and gas companies, which account for roughly 7% of global crude consumption, have committed themselves to greenhouse gas emission reduction targets that vary in scope and detail, making them hard for investors to compare.
Many climate ambitions among oil majors relate to results 3 decades into the future and depend on carbon offsets, whose availability is finite, and carbon capture and storage, a technology not currently deployed at commercial scale.
What does this mean, say, for the carbon footprint of a car driver at a petrol station?
If we take BP as an example, emissions from its own barrels, from wellhead to passenger car exhaust, amount to around 415 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year.
BP says it will reduce these emissions—roughly the same as Britain’s annual emissions—to net zero by 2050.
The net zero target does not cover crude and refined products that BP trades but which are initially brought out of the ground by other producers, a total that is much larger than the oil and gas BP produces itself. It says it aims to halve the carbon density of all energy that it trades by 2050.
BP’s peer Royal Dutch Shell has the oil and gas sector’s broadest plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, although it depends on pivoting “toward serving businesses and sectors that by 2050 are also net-zero emissions.”
This means Shell relies on its customers’ choices to reach its aim.