The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), a CEO-led initiative that aims to accelerate the industry response to climate change, has revised its collective upstream methane and carbon intensity targets for 2025. These near-term targets support OGCI’s new strategy to accelerate both ambition and action, and they reflect progress made in reducing aggregate greenhouse-gas emissions since 2017.
OGCI says it met its initial 2025 upstream methane intensity target in 2020 and is now aiming for well below 0.20%. The organization says that absolute upstream methane emissions among its member companies have fallen by 35% since 2017.
OGCI’s carbon intensity target now aims to reduce the average carbon intensity of member companies’ aggregate upstream oil and gas operations from 23 kg of greenhouse gases per barrel of oil equivalent in 2017 to 17 kg by 2025. This was changed from a target of 20 kg. Members reported 19.5 kg in 2020, an improvement of 14% over the 2017 baseline.
OGCI’s methane intensity target now aims to reduce the average methane intensity of aggregate upstream oil and gas operations from 0.30% in 2017 to well below 0.20% by 2025, aiming for near-zero methane emissions. Members reported an aggregate intensity of 0.20% in 2020. Emissions reduction efforts reduced intensity by 35% over the 3 years from 2017 to 2020, with an improvement of 13% in 2020 alone.
Together, the revisions to these targets would bring an additional reduction of around 50 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year.