It has become painfully obvious in recent times that the oil and gas companies are
burning the candle at both ends.
On the one hand, they are continuing to drill for oil and gas, increasing the number of sites they are exploring, and generally screwing the planet for the rest of us.
On the other hand, they are making noises that indicate they are looking to reduce their overall carbon footprint.
Unfortunately, these two approaches are mutually exclusive. You literally cannot reduce the amount of carbon produced as a result of your activities if your activities are literally to produce carbon. The only way this works is if you stop doing your day-to-day activities and do something else.
It’s akin to farmers saying ‘I’m going to reduce the amount of meat and dairy products I make’ while still raising cattle and milking cows.
But now, it seems, the oil and gas companies (hereinafter referred to generically as Big Oil) have come to that sudden realisation.
It started at the last COP meeting in the Middle East. Haitham al-Ghais, the Kuwaiti oil executive and Opec secretary general sent letters to OPEC countries railing against any resolution that would name fossil fuel as a source of climate change.
In recent months Shell has rowed back on its climate change ambitions. In its recent annual report it has watered down its climate ambitions and decided that growing its liquefied natural gas business is better.1 (Well, it is for Shell, but not for everyone else)
Saudi Aramco - the biggest oil business in the world - responsible for the vast majority of income in Saudi Arabia - is promoting itself as being green because it invests in green initiatives.
But last year it made $121b in profits, 87% of which went as dividends to shareholders. It makes a big deal in its annual report about the fact that it is looking to the future and investing in renewable energies and climate-related projects. But the data do not support that. Admittedly I didn’t read all 237 pages of the financial report in detail. But - in and amongst the pages and pages of subsidiary companies, joint ventures and associated companies near the bottom - I found two companies which were 'renewable' related. One was a fuel cell manufacturing company in which Aramco held a 12.3% share, the other was a renewable energy company in which Aramco held a 34% share, but which was currently under liquidation.
Last year emissions from oil giant bp’s activities rose for the first time in 5 years.2 This is despite having ‘a plan’ to reduce emissions by 2050.
The head of ExxonMobil recently went on record in an interview and blamed the increase in emissions from fossil fuels on - what for it - consumers! Darren Woods has repeated a claim also made by Saudi Aramco that we should focus on climate change not by reducing the amount of stuff we burn (I.e. the life-blood of Big Oil) but by capturing and reducing the emissions from burning that stuff.3
This links in very, very nicely with a lot of the Big Oil propaganda around reducing emissions. All the major oil companies talk about it in their annual reports. Many have pages and pages on their website devoted to how they are heading towards a carbon-neutral future. But the devil is in the details with a lot of this and in many cases, there is no detail. A lot of what they talk about is just hot air (usually suffused with an unhealthy dose of carbon particulate matter).
The holy grail for oil companies is carbon capture.
For those who don’t know, carbon capture is a technology whereby all the nasty stuff that comes from burning fossil fuels is gathered up, converted to something a lot less nasty and either used in places where it makes sense (such as adding the fizz to carbonated drinks) or stored underground in rocks and things like that.
The devil - again - is in the details. At the basic level carbon capture is a proven technology. There are carbon capture plants out there that capture carbon from emissions-heavy processes, convert it to carbon dioxide and trap that.
The problem is that it’s inefficient, expensive, and power-hungry. On top of that if you add together all the carbon captured globally last year it comes to around 40 million tonnes. Last year the planet emitted 1000 times that. So we need to ramp up carbon capture a thousand-fold to even match what we’re pushing out today. This doesn’t even include any additional carbon pushed out as oil companies continue their inexorable growth. Nor does it make a dent in the carbon currently out there in the atmosphere that has been pumped out since the Industrial Revolution.
In other words, carbon capture as a technology is not the solution.
But the spectre of carbon capture is what’s allowing Big Oil to stand on its principle of ‘It’s not the burning that’s the issue, it’s the emissions’. As long as they can hold onto the hope that they can continue plundering the planet’s oil, coal, and gas deposits, burn them as they wish, and capture the resulting ‘nasty stuff’ using fairy dust and unicorn tears they’re happy.
It’s also in their interests to perfect this technology because current carbon capture projects are using the captured carbon to create CO2 which is then pumped back into oil wells under pressure to drill for more oil. Of course, they’re going to like it!
But the basic underlying issue is that it doesn’t work at scale.
For pilot plants - small, discreet places where they can control all the variables - they have put carbon capture into place. They’ve added the tech to their oil platforms and they’ve captured carbon. But they haven’t captured all of it, they’ve spent a large amount of money doing so, and - more importantly - they’ve used a lot of energy running the plant.
So we have the bizarre situation where an oil company is extracting oil in an energy-intensive process, then using another energy-intensive process to capture the carbon from that first process. In some sort of recursive fractal-like hell, they should then add carbon capture to the carbon capture process to capture the carbon from that energy use and so on and so on in a never-ending circle of hell.
But - in much the same way as lithium batteries and electric cars were not considered viable decades ago but have now risen to prominence - I’m going to give carbon capture the benefit of the doubt. Is it possible that in future the technology will advance to such a stage that we can easily, cheaply and efficiently capture all the carbon being emitted globally and use it for the benefit of everyone?
Possible.
Will that time period be soon enough to allow this to mitigate the major effects of climate change?
Absolutely not.
We are already past the 1.5-degree limit originally chosen at the first COP meeting. We are rapidly heading toward 2 degrees (and 2.5 after that). Climate scientists are ‘scared’, ‘concerned’ and ‘worried’ about the speed at which major climate tipping points are being vaulted over.
This then begs the question of how much money are fossil fuel giants actually throwing at carbon capture projects.
Difficult to say.
ExxonMobil’s carbon capture website boasts that it has already captured 40% of all anthropogenic carbon emissions ever to be captured (a blatant case of paltering) and it links to a company it recently purchased (Denbury Inc.) in an all-stock takeover which cost it - well, nothing. It values the company at $4.9B and Exxon is classifying this under its carbon reduction efforts - even though it is actually just a carbon pipeline along the gulf coast AND it also includes ”Gulf Coast and Rocky Mountain oil and natural gas operations, consisting of proved reserves totalling more than 200 million barrels of oil equivalent as of year-end 2022, with approximately 46,000 oil-equivalent barrels per day of current production”. In other words it bought more oil and gas production and framed it as a carbon reduction exercise because it included a pipeline in which they could carry CO2.
It’s things like this that make it incredibly difficult to trust Big Oil when they talk about going carbon neutral in 2050.
I can’t see it happening. Can you?
2 https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/bps-operational-emissions-edge-higher-in-2023/ar-BB1jy2xy
3 https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/bps-operational-emissions-edge-higher-in-2023/ar-BB1jy2xy