Statoil Claims to Care About Climate Change, Commits Future to Oil and Gas

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Big oil company Statoil yesterday released its โ€˜climate roadmapโ€™. It said the plan โ€œwill further strengthen Statoilโ€™s industry leadership in climateย performanceโ€.

A closer look shows that Statoil โ€” a major player in the UKโ€™s North Sea oil and gas industry โ€” doesnโ€™t plan to change much, however. The Norwegian oil company plans to still be a big oil and gas company decades from now, ignoring ย warnings that its carbon bubble may burst as the world moves away from fossil fuels to cut emissions and tackle climateย change.

In a five minute video accompanying the roadmapโ€™s launch, Bjรธrn Otto Sverdrup, Statoil’s senior vice president for sustainability, said โ€œit is very important for energy companies to take a stand and help to contribute to reduceย emissionsโ€.

But the plan makes clear Statoil is going to make a pretty token effort to doย this.

Statoilโ€™s activities currently emit around 15 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. The roadmap says it plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by three million tonnes each year between 2017 andย 2030.

While that is no small amount, it is still falls short of Norwayโ€™s national emissions reduction target, Nina Jensen, head of the WWF Norway told Reuters.

And Statoil still plans for at least 80 percent of its investments to be in fossil fuels in 2030. Thatโ€™s an awful lot, given analysts estimate about 80 percent of the worldโ€™s fossil fuel reserves need to remain in the ground if the world is going to curb warming to twoย degrees.

Statoil also says it will continue to burn off excess methane from its wells until 2030. Methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide within the first 20 years after it isย emitted.

It is also not planning to spend much onย renewables.

The roadmap says Statoil plans to invest around $200 million on โ€œnew energy solutionsโ€ over the next four to seven years. That includes spending on highly expensive and not yet proven carbon capture, use and storageย technology.

And that low carbon investment would only represent about 0.4 percent of Statoilโ€™s annual capital expenditure, which totalled $10.1 billion inย 2016.

Statoil also promises to apply an internal carbon price of $50 per tonne when making investment decisions. That is not a new pledge, and is actually slightly lower than Statoilโ€™s midpoint carbon price reported by analysts CDP a few monthsย ago.

Itโ€™s also lower than the $80 per tonne figure Exxon said it applies, and a long way off the $220 figure some academics suggest is necessary to really curb fossil fuel production and hit the global two degreesย target.

So what Statoilโ€™s climate roadmap really shows is that it will be pretty much business as usual for the fossil fuelย giant.

It is not the only oil company to this week claim it cares about climate change. Shell’s chief executive Ben van Beurden warned the industry it risked losing public trust if it didn’t speed theย transition to low carbon energyย production.

As if to hammer home the point that Big Oil stands united in climate-friendlyย words if not action, the penultimate page of Statoilโ€™s climate roadmap features a picture of its chief executive sitting alongside the headย of Shell and other major fossil fuel company chiefsย as part of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative โ€” a group known for promoting the industryโ€™s greenwash.

Main image credit: Statoil/Ole Jรธrgenย Bratland

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Mat was DeSmog's Special Projects and Investigations Editor, and Operations Director of DeSmog UK Ltd. He was DeSmog UKโ€™s Editor from October 2017 to March 2021, having previously been an editor at Nature Climate Change and analyst at Carbon Brief.

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