Eight major oil companies have joined forces to tackle climate change and to boost energy transition throughout the industry. Seven European plus American Occidental Petroleum agreed upon the “collaborative platform” of six guiding principles, companies jointly stated this Thursday.
BP, Shell, the Italian Eni, Galp, Repsol, Total and Occidental Petroleum are the companies involved in the agreement, which objectives are to support collective industry acceleration of the Paris Accord on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, lower carbon use, as well as transparency and alignment with global climate change efforts.
“Meeting the challenge of tackling climate change requires unprecedented collaboration between energy companies, governments, investors and other stakeholders. The principles will act as a framework for actions leading energy companies are taking together, as well as a platform for collaborating with wider stakeholders.” said the CEOs of the participating companies, in a joint statement.
The guiding principles are: public support for the goals of the Paris Agreement; industry decarbonization, In line with each company’s individual strategy, ambitions and aims; energy system collaboration, to develop and promote approaches to reduce emissions from use of energy; development of carbon sinks, such as carbon capture, utilization and storage technology (CCUS) and natural sinks; transparency, to provide disclosure related to climate change risks and opportunities; and industry trade associations.
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Collaborative platform and further individual efforts
Although the platform involves collaboration from eight companies, each one of them will be free to tackle the issue according to their performance and technical work, the statement says, as stakeholders are asking for more consistency and transparency upon the metrics and methodologies used to report industry-climate performance.
In this regard, Eni announced on Wednesday, that it is also collaborating with the Boston Consulting Group and Google Cloud in the development of an open digital platform for companies pretending to tackle the climate change issue.
Also, ExxonMobil, which is not on the list, announced this week its efforts to lower their greenhouse emissions. Exxon’s plan sets a “intensity of upstream emissions to drop by 15-20%; methane intensity by 40-50%; flaring intensity by 35-45%,” the company says in its statement.
“We welcome the Energy Transition Principles; which focus industry attention not just on what each company needs to do alone, but what all must do together. This cross-sector work will be vital to achieving the goal of Net Zero emissions in the real economy by 2050 or sooner,” said Anne Simpson, Climate Action 100+ Board Member from CalPERs.
