NatWest among several banks in ‘net zero’ alliance continuing to support the fossil fuel industry
At a glance
Banks with net zero pledges helped raise $1 trillion for companies expanding fossil fuels
Among them is NatWest, which may have broken climate pledge by funding BP
BP is developing a ‘carbon bomb’ in Azerbaijan, host of COP climate talks
Less than a hundred miles from where world leaders are discussing how to meet their climate pledges, BP is drilling for gas.
The Shafag-Asiman project, a sprawling gas field off the Azerbaijani coast, could inject more than 1 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. That is more than the UK would emit over three years, striking a major blow to efforts to slow down global warming.
BP has said it intends to invest heavily in new oil and gas fields in the coming years. But it would be unable to pursue these dirty projects without billions in support from big banks. NatWest, for one, helped BP raise almost $500m last year in an apparent breach of its climate commitments.
Banks will be in focus at Cop29, currently underway in Baku, Azerbaijan, as world leaders discuss how to raise trillions of dollars for countries suffering the effects of climate change.
Although talks are unlikely to address their continued support for dirty energy, more than 140 banks worldwide have pledged to cut emissions associated with their lending and investments to almost zero by 2050.
In May 2021, the IEA, the global body coordinating countries’ energy policies, sounded the alarm. Any new oil and gas developments would make it inevitable that temperatures would rise by more than 1.5 degrees. In other words, they would devastate the planet.
Meanwhile, at BP’s Shafag-Asiman field, engineers were celebrating after finding fossil gas several thousand metres under the seabed – a new discovery that could significantly increase its output from the region. And the bankers were preparing to raise billions more for BP.
That’s not all. Since May 2021, global banks that have committed to net zero have poured almost $1 trillion into companies pursuing expansion of oil and gas projects that would push the world beyond its survivable limits. Taken together these projects would produce almost seven times the annual emissions of the US.
“It’s indefensible,” said John Lang, founder of the Net Zero Tracker, which evaluates big companies’ green plans. “There’s no way we can meet the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement if we continue financing the exploration of oil and gas.”
He said banks with net zero commitments covering direct and indirect emissions could not fund oil and gas expansion. “It’s greenwashing, plain and simple.”
NatWest said it could not comment on specific customers. It said it had conducted a review into its relationships with a number of oil and gas companies “to ensure they had a credible transition plan aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement”. It refuted the suggestion it had not met its public commitments.
BP said it is aiming to be a net zero company by 2050 or sooner and believes its strategy is consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
‘Net zero’
It was at Cop26 three years ago that a number of major banks first pledged that by 2050 they would cut almost all the emissions from their lending and investments to zero and invest in financial products to offset the remaining emissions – which has come to be known as “net zero”. NatWest, for instance, promised to stop funding companies that do not have a credible plan to shift their business away from fossil fuels. Its support for BP suggests it may have broken that promise.
BP reported record profits in February last year and promptly announced it would scale back its climate commitments and increase investments in oil and gas. It then enlisted the help of NatWest and a host of other ‘net zero’ banks to raise a total of $5.3bn in 2023 – and went on to invest $4.8bn in its oil and gas operations in the first half of this year.
In April, BP announced the first oil to be extracted from a new platform off the coast of Azerbaijan, which is expected to be operating until at least 2049, just a year before the world is supposed to have cut its dependence on fossil fuels.
The world-leading Grantham Research Institute assessed how credible the largest oil and gas companies’ transition plans were. It said BP’s fell short by a significant margin.
Many of the world’s biggest banks trumpet their net zero pledges to bolster their green credentials. But Nigel Topping, a member of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, explains that even when banks commit to cutting emissions associated with their financing in line with net zero, “it doesn’t stop them from financing companies who are continuing to expand [oil and gas production]”.
More than 180 companies expanding fossil fuel production have raised money from ‘net zero’ banks since May 2021, according to an analysis of data from the environmental campaign group, Rainforest Action Network. Their expansion projects are spread across the globe, from ConocoPhillips in the Arctic circle to Petrobras near the mouth of the Amazon river, and Shell in the UK’s North Sea.
A TBIJ analysis of the Global Oil and Gas Exit list, compiled by environmental campaign group Urgewald, shows these expansionary projects could produce almost 90 billion barrels of oil equivalent, which scientists say should stay in the ground. Around half of that is oil and half is gas, according to Urgewald, and calculations suggest it could generate more than 34 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions when burned.
Topping said: “The fundamental problem is that the transition is not driven by regulation … The only people who can make companies change are regulators, and the regulators are letting us down.”
Lead image: Offshore oil rigs at Baku Bay, near Baku, Azerbaijan. Anatoliy Zhdanov / Sipa US / Alamy Stock Photo
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A small tax on just seven of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies could grow the UN Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage by more than 2000% and help address the costs of extreme weather events, according to new analysis published today by Greenpeace International and Stamp Out Poverty. The organisations are calling for a long term global tax on fossil fuel extraction, with year-on-year increases, combined with taxes on excess profits and other levies.
A ‘Climate Damages Tax’ would put a cost on every tonne of carbon emitted by the coal, oil and gas extracted – starting at $5 per tonne and rising each year thereafter. If it was imposed on ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, TotalEnergies, BP, Equinor and ENI it could raise $15 billion in the first year alone to help the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries pay for the escalating cost of damage caused by climate change. Currently, just $702 million has been pledged to the loss and damage fund, while the combined profits of those fossil fuel companies exceeds $148 billion.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
Earlier this month, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, French President Emmanuel Macron and Kenyan President William Ruto stated their support for a Climate Damages Tax.
The briefing also highlights the financial costs of some of this year’s worst weather events that have been attributed to climate change, totalling over $64bn. These include Hurricane Beryl, Hurricane Helene, the heatwave in India in May, Typhoon Carina/Gaemi, the floods in Brazil in May, and the floods in Kenya and Tanzania in April. The costs of damage from the disasters surveyed range from US$2.9bn (Typhoon Carina) to US$ 25bn (heatwaves in India), and present just a fraction of the total cost of loss and damage globally over the last year.
A Climate Damages Tax imposed only on wealthy OECD countries could play an essential role in helping the poorest and most vulnerable to rebuild after climate-related disasters. Increasing annually by US$5 per tonne of CO2-equivalent based on the volumes of oil and gas extracted, the tax could raise an estimated US$900 billion by 2030 to support governments and communities around the world as they face growing climate impacts.
“While oil and gas giants keep raking in grotesque levels of profit from exploiting resources, the damages resulting from the industry’s operations are disproportionately borne by people who did not cause the crisis,” said David Hillman, Director of Stamp Out Poverty. “A climate damages tax – along with other levies on fossil fuels and high-emitting sectors – will make polluters pay for the cost of climate impacts, as well as supporting workers and affected communities in the transition to clean energy, jobs, and transport.”
“Who should pay? This is fundamentally an issue of climate justice and it is time to shift the financial burden for the climate crisis from its victims to the polluters behind it,” said Abdoulaye Diallo, Co-Head of Greenpeace International’s Stop Drilling Start Paying campaign. “Our analysis lays bare the scale of the challenge posed by climate loss and damage and the urgent need for innovative solutions to raise the funds to meet it. We reject Big Oil’s assault on people and democracy and call on governments worldwide to adopt the Climate Damages Tax and other mechanisms to extract revenue from the oil and gas industry.”
The Loss and Damage Fund was announced at COP27 in Egypt to help developing countries pay for impacts of natural disasters caused by climate change. Recently renamed the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), it currently has US$702 million in pledged funds. According to Greenpeace International and Stamp Out Poverty’s calculations, a Climate Damages Tax levied on seven major international oil and gas companies would add in the first year alone US$15.02 billion, corresponding to over 21 times what is currently pledged to the fund.
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Protesters hit out at fossil fuel corporations fuelling the climate crisis and profiting from genocide in Gaza
Activists demonstrate for climate justice and a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, November 11, 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan
PROTESTERS hit out at oil giant BP “hijacking” Cop29 while profiting from the genocide in Gaza as the international climate summit kicked off in Azerbaijan today.
Palestine and climate campaigners protested outside the firm’s London headquarters as world leaders headed the latest round of international climate talks.
As the UN warned 2024 is set to be the hottest year on record, Fossil Free London activists held a banner reading “BP, stop fuelling genocide and climate breakdown.”
They demanded BP stop its oil and gas extraction, “hijacking” the Conference of the Parties (Cop) process in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku and “profiteering from genocide.”
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Human rights experts have warned that countries and corporations supplying oil to Israeli armed forces may be complicit in war crimes and genocide following an International Court of Justice ruling on Israel.
Joanna Warrington, a campaigner with Fossil Free London, said: “It’s the very same fossil fuel giants that profit from the suffering of billions as our climate tips closer to collapse, which are fuelling and enabling Israel’s horrific colonial genocide.
View of Teesside, site of the planned £1.5 billion Net Zero Teesside Power gas-fired power plant with carbon capture. Credit: Bill Allsopp / Alamy Stock Photo.
The new Labour government is pledging billions to support projects based on climate-heating natural gas.
This story is the sixth part of a DeSmog series on carbon capture and was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europe.
Norwegian state-owned oil and gas company Equinor, the North Sea’s largest fossil fuel producer, is positioning itself to play a key role in plans to turn Britain into a world leader in capturing carbon.
Earlier this month, the new Labour government pledged £21.7 billion over 25 years to finance carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects shortlisted by the previous Conservative administration. Equinor was among several companies awarded a total of £3.9 billion in subsidies from 2025 to 2026 under the scheme when Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves delivered the Autumn Budget on Wednesday.
But a DeSmog analysis of the company’s plans points to a series of technical, environmental and economic risks that raise questions over whether the projects will succeed in reducing emissions — or make them worse.
The uncertainties centre on Equinor’s backing for new “net zero” gas-fired power plants fitted with technology to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) billowing from their smokestacks, and bury the gas in disused oil and gas fields under the North Sea.
Carbon capture has never been deployed on gas-fired power stations at such a scale before — and a senior Equinor executive has made frank admissions around the technical challenges such projects face. Even if they perform as hoped, the power plants would likely burn imported liquified natural gas (LNG) from the United States, Qatar, and other suppliers — a fuel source that emits high levels of climate-heating methane when it’s being extracted, transported and stored.
Climate advocates are also concerned about Equinor’s plans to develop a UK market for “blue hydrogen”. This clean-burning fuel is made from natural gas, with carbon capture technology used to trap emissions released during the process. Even if the majority of these emissions are stored, however, the problem of methane leaking from the natural gas supply chain remains.
“This is not a decarbonisation project, it’s a ‘recarbonisation project’,” said environmental consultant Andrew Boswell, who launched a legal challenge to one of the new gas-power projects backed by Equinor and British oil giant BP in July.
Credit: Sabrina Bedford.
Lobbying Push
With oil and gas companies intensifying their lobbying of government ministers over carbon capture in recent years, Equinor, which supplies about 27 percent of the UK’s natural gas, has secured a prime seat at the table. Equinor executives attended 16 meetings with UK ministers from 2020 to 2023 to discuss CCS — more than any other company, and second only to the Carbon Capture and Storage Association lobby group, which held 20 meetings, according to transparency records [See related story].
Concerned about the fossil fuel industry’s role in shaping the UK’s carbon capture strategy, a group of scientists and campaigners wrote to Ed Miliband, Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, in September to urge him to reconsider the UK government’s support for the proposed gas-fired power and blue hydrogen projects.
“Putting the UK on the wrong pathway could be catastrophic,” wrote the authors, who included professors from 10 universities, including the University of Cambridge and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Currently, this policy would lock the UK into using fossil fuel-based energy generation to well past 2050.”
Responding to the criticisms, Stuart Haszeldine, a geology professor at the University of Edinburgh and several other UK-based university professors, wrote their own letter to Miliband this month in support of CCS, and urged the government to disburse promised funding to avoid further delays.
“The fact remains that to achieve Net Zero in the UK by 2050 we need to deploy CCS at scale, and we need to deploy it well,” the authors wrote. “Not doing so could lead the UK to lose its status as a world leader in the space of tackling climate change, climate technology innovation, and a hub for investment for the energy transition.”
Technical Challenges
Equinor’s flagship carbon capture project in Britain is the estimated £1.5 billion Net Zero Teesside Power gas-fired power plant in the northeast of England, to be built in partnership with BP on the site of the demolished Teesside Steelworks.
Equinor and BP describe Net Zero Teesside Power as a “world-first gas-fired power station with carbon capture” and estimate that it will capture up to two million tonnes of CO2 per year by 2027, about 0.5 percent of the UK’s current yearly emissions.
Worldwide, attempts to make fossil fuel power plants cleaner through CCS have proved costly and challenging, however. So far, the approach has mostly only been used at power stations which burn coal — and even then the climate impact has been miniscule.
Only about 1.5 million tonnes of the world’s 37 billion tonnes of energy sector emissions each year, or 0.004 percent, were captured from power stations fitted with CCS in 2023, according to a DeSmog analysis of data from the Global CCS Institute, an industry group, and reporting from the SaskPower company in Canada.
And past attempts to build large gas-fired power stations with carbon capture in the UK, Norway, and Canada never made it past the planning stage.
That’s for both economic and technical reasons: It’s much harder and more expensive to capture the diffuse CO2 molecules emitted by burning natural gas than it is to mop up the denser CO2 concentrations spewed by natural gas processing facilities, the most common source of captured carbon worldwide.
‘Needle in a Haystack‘
Equinor encountered these challenges first-hand in 2006, when the company (then known as Statoil) began an estimated £650 million project to capture CO2 from its Mongstad gas-fired power station.
Then-prime minister of Norway Jens Stoltenberg called the project a “moon landing” for the climate, but project costs soon ballooned beyond earlier estimates, and the plan was abandoned in 2013. More recently, doubts about Equinor’s ability to capture CO2 from gas-fired power plants surfaced from within the company’s senior management.
Henrik Solgaard Andersen, then Equinor’s vice-president for low carbon technology, told Recharge Newsin 2021 that CCS at gas-fired power stations was “very difficult” and like “finding a needle in a haystack”.
Nevertheless, Equinor and BP told the UK government in their 2021 application for Net Zero Teesside Power that the companies could capture up to 95 percent of CO2 emissions at the gas-fired power plant. And the project’s website says the plant will capture “over 95% of emissions”.
That appeared to contradict Andersen’s 2021 comments to Recharge News, where he said a large gas-fired power station “will not be able to capture that amount of CO2” (90-plus percent).
“Nobody has run a dispatchable power plant with CCS before. Nobody knows really what the energy efficiency will be and the capture rate,” Andersen was quoted as saying.
When asked by DeSmog to clarify the apparent disparity between Andersen’s prior statements and company estimates for Net Zero Teesside Power, an Equinor spokesperson suggested referring all technical questions to BP, which will run operations at the power station.
“We believe that CCS could play a vital role in the UK’s transition to net zero by enabling industrial carbon capture, low-carbon hydrogen production, and power with carbon capture,” said the Equinor spokesperson.
BP did not respond to multiple requests for further information regarding CO2 capture estimates for Net Zero Teesside Power.
Equinor says its major investments in offshore wind and CCS will put the company on track to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050 — and says it plans to store 30 to 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2035 at various sites in Norway, the UK, Denmark and the United States, an over thirtyfold increase from the 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 it stored last year.
The company opened its new Northern Lights carbon transport and storage facility in Norway last month, a joint venture with Shell and TotalEnergies, but has yet to store large quantities of CO2 at the site.
‘Flawed’ Estimates
Even if Equinor and BP can achieve capture rates of 95 percent in Teesside, some researchers say that the project and others like it could still undermine Britain’s climate ambitions.
Lorenzo Sani, a power analyst from the London-based financial think tank Carbon Tracker, concluded in a June report that “flawed assumptions” and “underestimates” marred the government’s analysis of the Net Zero Teesside Power project’s potential emissions — which could make its climate impact up to four times higher than stated by BP and Equinor.
Sani argues that BP and Equinor have not taken adequate account of “upstream emissions” — methane and CO2 released during the production and transport of the natural gas burned in the power station.
As North Sea oil and gas production declines, the UK is increasingly importing gas in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), with the majority from the United States. This gas generally has a higher emissions footprint than UK or Norwegian gas due to the elevated amounts of methane and CO2 released during extraction, and the process of turning the gas into a liquid, and shipping it.
In Teesside, U.S.-based company WaveCrest Energy plans to build a new liquified natural gas import terminal to satisfy future gas demand in the region, which it advertises as “sustainable” and “low carbon” — despite its significant carbon footprint.
“Liquefied natural gas comes with a much heavier carbon intensity when combustion emissions are removed, because in the whole supply chain, there are higher energy losses and leaks,” Sani said. “So the carbon intensity of the gas that is delivered is at five or more times higher than natural gas from the North Sea.”
That critique was the basis of the case brought by Boswell, the environmental consultant, who argued that planning permission for Equinor and BP’s Net Zero Teesside Power plant failed to consider the full climate impact of the project.
In her July ruling in favour of the government, High Court Justice Nathalie Lieven, however, found that “no logical flaw” was made by ministers in granting planning permission for the project. Boswell has appealed the ruling, with a hearing due in March.
In response to detailed questions about the government’s CCS strategy submitted by DeSmog, a spokesman for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said that the Climate Change Committee, an independent government advisory body, had described carbon capture as “a necessity not an option for reaching our climate goals.”
“Carbon capture, usage and storage will play a vital role in a decarbonised power system,” the spokesperson said.
WaveCrest Energy did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Business as Usual’
Beyond concerns over the emissions footprint of the planned projects, it is also unclear how Equinor and other oil companies venturing into the UK’s nascent carbon capture market can expect to make such projects pay.
Carbon capture advocates often cite Equinor’s success at capturing CO2 from its Sleipner offshore gas field in the North Sea since 1996 as proof the technology can work.
But critics point out that the project did nothing to reduce consumption of fossil fuels.
Ada Nissen, a University of Oslo historian, argues that the Sleipner project allowed Equinor to continue “business as usual” — earning the company a rebate on a new Norwegian carbon tax, but doing nothing to curb further natural gas extraction or consumption.
What’s more, company figures for the amount of CO2 stored at Sleipner have not always proved reliable.
Equinor has admitted over-reporting the amount of CO2 captured at Sleipner during the period 2017-2021 due to an equipment malfunction, DeSmog reported this week, expanding on findings by Norwegian public broadcaster NRK Rogaland in 2022.
Elsewhere, in the 52 years since carbon capture was first deployed in a Texas oilfield, the fossil fuel industry has mostly used the technique to revive depleting oilfields by pumping CO2 back underground to force hard-to-reach oil to the surface. Selling that oil helped make the expensive business of capturing carbon economically viable — and generated more emissions when the oil was burned.
DeSmog revealed in March that the North Sea oil industry has long studied the possibility of using the technique — known as enhanced oil recovery — to reanimate declining offshore fields. Nevertheless, oil companies such as Shell and Equinor say they have no plans to do so.
That raises the question of how industry will finance the UK’s carbon capture plans.
The previous Conservative government set a target to capture 20 to 30 million tonnes of CO2 by 2030 — from none today. Such a build-out would mean constructing the equivalent of roughly half of the world’s total CCS capacity of about 50 million tonnes, which took half a century to develop, over the next five years. The new Labour government has not explicitly endorsed that target, though its carbon capture strategy is broadly in line with its predecessor’s.
In Britain, two decades of on-off attempts to introduce CCS have foundered due to the lack of a viable market to sell captured CO2, and wavering policy support.
“There’s been no monetary value placed on putting carbon back into the ground, and that’s why it doesn’t happen,” said Haszeldine, the geology professor at the University of Edinburgh.
Under the UK’s emissions trading scheme (ETS), companies must buy CO2 pollution allowances. In theory, rising prices for these permits could incentivise companies to capture carbon — instead of venting it into the atmosphere. Permits are trading at less than £40 per tonne, however, far below the estimated costs for capturing CO2 from a variety of sources. For example, the U.S.-based National Petroleum Council estimated in 2021 that it would cost an average of £90 per tonne to capture CO2 from a large gas-fired power plant.
In the absence of a reliable market signal, industry is clear that it will need significant subsidies.
Funding Concerns
The UK’s Carbon Capture Storage Association lobby group — which counts Equinor as a member — estimates that £2-3 billion in subsidies will be needed a year by 2028 to get a British CCS industry off the ground. That’s roughly in line with the government’s £3.9 billion in CCS subsidies for 2025-2026 announced on Wednesday, but higher than Labour’s pledge of £21.7 billion over 25 years — an average of less than £1 billion annually.
Despite past funding pledges, successive governments have come nowhere near to disbursing such funds. Since 2020, the government has granted £171 million for CCS and hydrogen projects as part of its 2021 UK Research and Innovation funding scheme. Equinor was the second largest recipient, with project grants amounting to more than £22 million, behind Italian oil company Eni with £30 million, according to a DeSmog review of the government’s subsidy database.
Companies are open about their worries over shortfalls.
In June last year, representatives of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association told Grant Shapps, then Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, that its members were concerned about delays and there was a “struggle to keep investors upbeat”, according to meeting notes obtained by DeSmog via a freedom of information request.
In a presentation given at a London CCS conference in October last year, Catherine Raw — then vice-president for Scottish utility SSE — stated that plans to scale up the UK’s gas-fired power CCS were beset by “lack of pace” which made them “unachievable.” If nothing happened soon, the then government’s plan to decarbonise electricity generation by 2035 — a target which Labour has since brought forward to 2030 — would force SSE to shut down much of its business. SSE did not respond to a request for comment.
To meet the net zero challenge, SSE is partnering with Equinor to build two gas-fired power plants with CCS priced at £2.2 billion each, in Peterhead, Scotland and Keadby in the east of England. Neither project has yet been selected for government funding, with priority given to Net Zero Teesside Power.
The Peterhead project has sparked opposition from climate groups including Friends of the Earth Scotland, which organised a protest in Edinburgh last month. “Projects like Peterhead carbon capture and Net Zero Teesside are wasting both time and money that should be spent on climate solutions that work from day one and will improve lives,” said Alex Lee, a campaigner for the group, responding to the CCS subsidy announcement in the Budget. “These greedy energy companies will do whatever it takes to keep the subsidies flowing, leaving the UK public to pick up the tab for its inevitable failure.”
In addition to Equinor and SSE, German energy company RWE plans to build CCS retrofits at three gas-fired power plants it operates in Pembroke, Wales, and Great Yarmouth and Staythorpe in eastern England, as well as a new-built gas power station with CCS at Stallingborough, also in eastern England. RWE estimates the projects could capture up to 11 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.
In February, Uniper — the German-state owned power utility and gas company — also announced plans to retrofit its Connah’s Quay gas-fired power station in Wales with CCS.
“Efficient gas-fired power stations fitted with carbon capture will support the transition to renewables by providing a firm and flexible power source, crucial for filling the gap when there is insufficient wind or solar energy to meet demand,” RWE said in a statement.
Uniper did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Meanwhile, other carbon capture projects remain stalled. In June, Equinor delayed the potential start-date for a planned blue hydrogen plant near Hull on the east coast of England until 2027 at the earliest, citing funding concerns.
In September, Equinor cancelled plans to export blue hydrogen from Norway to Germany, citing lack of demand and economic challenges. And this month, ExxonMobil dropped plans to build a CO2 pipeline from its Fawley Refinery in southern England, linked to a proposed blue hydrogen plant at the site.
Budget Announcement
While the government’s carbon capture funding shortlist initially included eight projects, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said this month that the list would be cut to three.
The recipients are Net Zero Teesside Power; a blue hydrogen plant to be operated by EET Technologies — a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate and oil company Essar; and the Protos waste-to-energy power station with CCS, planned by waste and energy companies Biffa and Encyclis in Merseyside.
Left out of the funding round from the government’s initial shortlist were two blue hydrogen facilities planned in Teesside; a lime plant; a separate waste-to-power facility in Merseyside; and a project to capture CO2 at the Padeswood cement works in northern Wales.
In addition to the three selected carbon capture projects, the government plans to support Italian oil and gas company Eni’s CO2 transport and storage project in the Irish Sea as part of the HyNet Cluster in Merseyside, as well as the Northern Endurance Partnership CO2 transport and storage project in the North Sea, to be operated by Equinor, BP and TotalEnergies.
Eni says that its HyNet CO2 transport and storage network on land and in the Irish Sea could handle up to 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year, with plans to scale capacity to 10 million tonnes after 2030.
“The project will help preserve local jobs by supporting the decarbonisation of hard-to-abate industries, as well as attracting investment and creating new jobs,” said an Eni spokesperson.
David Parkin, chair of the HyNet Alliance, which includes Eni and EET Technologies, said that all blue hydrogen produced by EET Technologies will meet the UK’s “Low Carbon Hydrogen Standard” and estimates that more than 97 percent of CO2 will be captured from its blue hydrogen production plant.
“The low-carbon hydrogen can be stored in significant quantities to support the UK’s energy security and provide a reliable source of power for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine,” Parkin said.
The government’s decision to prioritise natural gas-based CCS projects such as new gas-fired power plants and blue hydrogen has alarmed some climate advocates, who recommend that the technology be used to clean up existing dirty industries, not build more fossil-based infrastructure.
Any investments in carbon capture “should be focusing on genuine ‘hard-to-abate’ applications like cement, fertiliser, and other chemicals processing/refining — not power generation and blue hydrogen,” said Arjun Flora, European director of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank, which analysed the UK’s carbon capture strategy last year.
“The most likely consequence is a waste of public money, at a time when budgets are constrained,” he added.
Equinor’s Hammerfest LNG export terminal on the Norwegian island of Melkøya. Credit: Fredrik Varfjell / NTB / Alamy.
Record Profits
While Equinor, BP and other companies waited for subsidies from the UK government to develop carbon capture in recent years, skyrocketing energy prices earned them record profits from oil and gas. In 2022, Equinor recorded adjusted earnings of £61 billion, more than double its previous annual record.
With demand for Norwegian oil and gas remaining strong, Equinor’s chief executive Anders Opedal announced plans in August to invest between £4.3 and £5 billion a year to maintain production levels in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea until 2035.
The company and partner Ithaca Energy also plan to invest an initial £3.1 billion to drill the Rosebank oil field west of the Shetland Islands, the UK’s largest fossil fuel project in a decade.
Last year, DeSmog revealed that former Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt had reassured Equinor’s Opedal of the government’s support for the Rosebank project during a meeting in January 2023, and had appeared to suggest that low carbon investments could improve the company’s image.
Even if Equinor succeeds in transforming the North Sea into a vast CO2 capture and storage site, however, the company’s target to store 30 to 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2035 would nowhere near offset the 262 million tonnes of CO2 emitted from its operations and burning its oil and gas last year, according to company data reviewed by DeSmog.
That’s more than 300 times the combined total of 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 emissions it captured and stored in 2023 at its carbon capture project at the Sleipner gas field, and a similar facility in the Barents Sea.
Carbon capture expert Stuart Haszeldine said that fossil fuel companies should be bound by a “carbon takeback obligation” — a legal mechanism aimed at forcing them to store an equivalent amount of CO2 to the quantity produced by burning their products.
By subsidising carbon capture without constraining fresh drilling, governments are allowing fossil fuel companies to “have their cake and eat it too,” he said.
Additional reporting by TJ Jordan and Michael Buchsbaum
Climate activists protested against BP at the energy giant’s annual general meeting in Aberdeen, Scotland on May 21, 2019. Karen Murray / Friends of the Earth Scotland.
Oil major BP has scrapped its goal of reducing oil and gas production by the end of the decade, angering environmental groups who say the company is prioritizing profits over the planet.
According to three sources who have knowledge on the matter, BP CEO Murray Auchincloss scaled back the company’s energy transition plans in order to regain investor confidence, reported Reuters.
“As Murray said at the start of the year in our fourth-quarter results, the direction is the same but we are going to deliver as a simpler, more focused and higher-value company,” a spokesperson for BP said, as The Times reported.
In 2020, BP unveiled an ambitious strategy to reduce its production by 40 percent, while quickly ramping up renewables by 2030, reported Reuters. In February of 2023, the London-based company pared back the reduction goal to 25 percent, as investors concentrated on near-term profits instead of the energy transition.
In 2022, the oil giant recorded record profits of $28 billion, The Guardian reported.
“It’s clear that Auchincloss is hell-bent on prioritising company profits and shareholder wealth above all else as extreme floods and wildfires rack up billions of dollars in damages, destroying homes and lives all over the world,” said Philip Evans, senior climate campaigner of Greenpeace UK, as reported by The Guardian.
Britain ended more than 140 years of coal power when it closed its last generator in September.
Coal emits more heat-trapping gas to the atmosphere than any other fossil fuel, so its demise as a source of electricity is an unalloyed good for the climate. Yet, with another announcement a week later, the UK government has helped extend the reign of fossil fuels well into the 21st century.Read more: How mainstream climate science endorsed the fantasy of a global warming time machine
Less than six months from polling day, the UK Labour party (then the official opposition) scrapped a campaign commitment to provide an annual stimulus of £28 billion (US$36.6 billion) for green industries.
Six billion pounds shy of this figure will now be raised over 25 years, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has revealed, but for a specific purpose: carbon capture and storage.
“The technology works by capturing CO₂ as it is being emitted by a power plant or another polluter, then storing it underground,” says Mark Maslin, a professor of natural sciences at UCL.
The Guardian reports that oil companies BP and Equinor will invest in a cluster of carbon capture and storage installations in Teesside, north-east England. Eni, an Italian oil company, is expected to develop sites in north-west England and north Wales. In each case, emissions will probably be pumped via gas pipes beneath the seabed.
Starmer anointed “a new era” for green jobs when announcing this funding, but experts claim he is actually offering symbolic and strategic support to climate-wrecking energy sources that have dominated for centuries.
“The Climate Change Act mandates the UK should achieve net zero emissions by 2050, yet this will be impossible if carbon capture leads to the UK building new gas power stations instead of wind and solar farms.”
Maslin was one of several scientists who wrote to energy secretary Ed Miliband criticising the plans. As he sees it, the government would not fund these projects if it did not see a future for fossil fuels beyond the middle of this century, by which time scientists have said our interference in the climate must end.
The message is clear: expensive imports of natural gas (essentially methane, a potent greenhouse gas) are here to stay. Even successful deployment of carbon scrubbers at the point of burning this gas would not erase its climate impact, Maslin says, as it leaks at all stages of its production and use.
But Maslin also doubts carbon capture and storage can siphon off the emissions of gas-fired power plants without adding to climate change. This is why climate scientists often describe carbon capture and storage as an unproven technology for decarbonising electricity and heavy industry: most of its applications have been in natural gas processing facilities where CO₂ is extracted for commercial uses.
“The track record of adding carbon capture to power plants is much worse, with the vast majority of projects abandoned,” Maslin explains.
More damning still, almost 80% of all the CO₂ captured by existing installations has been reinjected into oil fields – to pump more oil.
Could carbon capture and storage tech turn natural gas into zero-carbon hydrogen, as some hope? Again, Maslin is dubious. Water is a cleaner source for hydrogen and using this fuel to heat homes or decarbonise factories is a second-rate solution compared with renewable electricity, he says.
The fruits of appeasement
Maslin and his co-signatories say that carbon capture and storage should be limited to reducing emissions from existing fossil power plants or steel furnaces while these emission sources are rapidly phased out.
Marc Hudson at the University of Sussex is a historian of climate politics and policy in Australia, the US, UK and internationally. He has encountered policy proposals for carbon capture dating back to the 1970s and in his view, their overwhelming effect has been to prolong the use of fossil fuels by justifying investment in their expansion.
When trying to explain why rational climate policies like the mass insulation of draughty homes tends to lose out to investment in carbon capture and storage, Nils Markusson, a lecturer in environmental politics at Lancaster University, found something similar:
In other words, appeasing the fossil fuel industry is a proviso of policies drafted to address climate change. This limitation has also infiltrated scientific assessments of the climate.
A new report shows that “overshoot” scenarios – that is, projections of future climate change which accept the global target of 1.5°C will be at least temporarily breached – are rife in mainstream climate science.
This is despite evidence of the permanent damage such a breach would cause – and our doubtful ability to reverse warming once it has exceeded these dangerous levels using speculative carbon removal technology.
There is not enough land or energy to rapidly restore the carbon we have emitted. Oksana Bali/Shutterstock
What has led us here? Comprehending the climate crisis and its solutions on terms favourable to the fossil fuel industry say Wim Carton and Andreas Malm, political ecologists at Lund University.
“Avoiding climate breakdown demands that we bury the fantasy of overshoot-and-return and with it another illusion as well: that the Paris targets can be met without uprooting the status-quo.
“One limit after the other will be broken unless we manage to strand the necessary fossil assets and curtail opportunities for continuing to profit from oil and gas and coal.”
Drax power plant in Yorkshire. Credit: A.P.S. (UK) / Alamy Stock Photo
Scope of corporate influence underscores concerns the technology will be used to prolong demand for planet-heating natural gas.
This story is the third part of a DeSmog series on carbon capture and was developed with the support of Journalismfund Europeand published in partnership with the Guardian.
The UK government’s move to award £22 billion in subsidies to carbon capture projects followed a sharp increase in lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, DeSmog can reveal.
Oil and gas giants such as Equinor, BP, and ExxonMobil attended 24 out of 44 external ministerial meetings to discuss carbon capture and storage (CCS) in 2023, according to official transparency records.
That represented a surge in activity relative to 2020-2022, when ministers held about half as many meetings to discuss the technology, and oil and gas companies would attend seven to 10 of these discussions each year.
Meeting notes obtained via freedom of information requests showed how oil executives were involved in shaping policy, and used their access to underscore the need to continue developing oil and gas.
During a call in December with three Equinor executives, one of the company’s team told Jeremy Allen, then director of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, that Equinor “appreciate[s] the…collaborative approach to policy development.”
An executive from ExxonMobil’s Low Carbon Solutions division “spoke of the outstanding need for oil and gas, at the same time as needing to lower emissions” in a meeting with then energy minister Graham Stuart in March last year at the CERAWeek oil trade show in Houston.
The growing engagement by oil and gas companies has sharpened concerns among climate advocates that industry is skewing the UK’s carbon capture strategy to justify building new gas-fired power plants — prolonging demand for natural gas, a source of planet-heating carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane emissions.
“Fossil fuel companies often have the engineering know-how to build these projects, so the government naturally has to meet with them,” said Laurie Laybourn, environmental policy researcher and associate fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank. “But that might create a risk whereby these companies unduly influence policy and roll-out in a way that benefits them.”
Others engaging regularly with ministers on CCS policy include heavy manufacturing companies, CCS technology firms, lobby groups, and investment funds.
Researchers, climate groups, and local councils were less well represented, the transparency records showed. No individual organisation from these sectors has attended more than three meetings with ministers on carbon capture since the start of 2020.
Meanwhile, lobby group the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) — which represents dozens of fossil fuel companies — attended 20 meetings, and Equinor 16. BP, ExxonMobil, Scottish power company SSE, and Drax, a biomass power plant and the UK’s biggest CO2 emitter, also attended nine meetings each during the same period.
‘Wrong Pathway’
The new Labour government announced plans last week to extend £22 billion in subsidies for carbon capture over 25 years, saying the strategy can help meet climate goals and support a broader revitalization of British industry.
The policy builds on the previous Conservative administration’s plans to establish four CCS “clusters,” where carbon capture would be used to trap some of the CO2 emitted by fossil-fuel burning factories and power plants. Pipelines would then carry the captured gas underground to be stored in depleted oil and gas reservoirs under the North and Irish Seas.
The government’s plans include backing proposals by Equinor and BP — two of the companies that have met most frequently with ministers since January 2020 — to build new “low-carbon” gas-fired power stations fitted with carbon capture units, which are slated to be among the first to receive state support.
A group of scientists and campaigners warned last month that such projects would allow the companies to continue extracting and burning natural gas based on the promises of unproven and expensive carbon capture technology — at the taxpayer’s expense.
“Putting the UK on the wrong pathway could be catastrophic,” said the letter, addressed to Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Miliband.
Carbon Tracker, a financial think tank, warned in a March report that building new gas-fired power plants “could lock consumers into a high-cost and fossil-based future” and urged the UK to focus on deploying carbon capture in hard-to-decarbonise sectors such as cement.
“These ‘low-carbon’ gas projects are not really low carbon if you look at the whole supply chain,” said the report’s author Lorenzo Sani, referring to the large amount of natural gas, which is mostly comprised of the potent greenhouse gas methane, that leaks during the extraction and transport of the fuel.
“They also continue this paradigm that we have today of linking our economies with fossil fuels, whose markets are volatile and often controlled by external actors to the UK,” Sani added.
‘Struggle to Keep Investors Upbeat‘
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and International Energy Agency envisage significant deployments of carbon capture for reaching net zero emissions by mid-century.
However, many environmental groups are sceptical. Researchers point to the frequent failure of projects to meet carbon capture targets, cost-overruns, the need for multi-billion dollar subsidies, and the tendency of the oil and gas industry to use the technology to justify investments in new fossil fuel projects — rather than focus on cleaning up existing dirty industries.
The surge in lobbying by companies seeking public money coincided with the previous Conservative administration’s pledge of £20 billion in subsidies for carbon capture projects in March 2023.
Three months after that funding was announced, lobby group the CCSA told ministers its members were concerned about delays and there was a “struggle to keep investors upbeat”, according to meeting notes.
The CCSA has attended more government carbon capture meetings (20) than any other organisation since January 2020, including two meetings between January and March 2024, the latest period for which records are available.
The organisation had a presence at both this and last year’s Labour party conferences. The CCSA’s Head of Communications Joe Butler-Trewin has held various organising and research roles within the party, while CEO Ruth Herbert worked as a civil servant under Miliband, when he was Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change from 2008 to 2010. Miliband was a guest speaker at the CCSA’s annual meeting last year.
Now Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Miliband and the new Labour government announced plans last week to extend £22 billion in subsidies for carbon capture over 25 years, saying the strategy can help meet the country’s climate targets and support a broader revitalization of British industry.
When asked to comment on concerns that their CCS projects may “lock in” fossil fuel dependency, BP and Equinor gave almost identical statements, saying that CCS is essential for the UK’s transition to net zero and will create jobs.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said CCS will play a “vital role” in its plans for a clean energy system by 2030. The department also pointed to independent government advisor the Climate Change Committee’s description of carbon capture as a “necessity, not an option”.
The CCSA did not respond to requests for comment.
‘Outstanding Need for Oil and Gas’
Two meetings with ExxonMobil designated for the discussion of “carbon solutions” were used by both the company and then senior Department for Energy Security and Net Zero minister Graham Stuart to reaffirm the need for continued oil and gas production in the UK, meeting notes show.
On March 8, 2023, Stuart met with at least one executive from ExxonMobil’s Low Carbon Solutions division at the CERAWeek oil trade show. Representatives from the North Sea Transition Authority regulator and the Department for Business and Trade were also present.
According to notes from the meeting, the ExxonMobil executive “spoke of the outstanding need for oil and gas, at the same time as needing to lower emissions.”
Just over three months later, on June 15, Stuart met with representatives from ExxonMobil again to “discuss carbon solutions”.
However, after discussing ExxonMobil’s CCS capabilities, Stuart then told attendees “that the UK government has championed the need for new oil and gas licenses.” An ExxonMobil executive replied that “this was important in attracting new investment.”
Later in the meeting, minutes show that Stuart “reiterated that the Government supports the continued development of oil and gas resources on the UKCS [UK Continental Shelf].”
Four months later, the then Conservative government announced it was granting hundreds of new oil and gas licences in the North Sea.
‘Easily Spun‘
In the March 2023 meeting, ExxonMobil touted the success of carbon capture projects in the United States that had been used to pump more oil using “enhanced oil recovery” — where CO2 is injected into the ground to extract hard-to-reach oil and gas.
Meeting notes show an ExxonMobil executive told Stuart that the company had “captured 40% of all the CO2 that has ever been captured”.
The ExxonMobil employee’s statement appeared to refer to the approximately 120 million tonnes of CO2 captured by its Shute Creek gas-processing plant in Wyoming, which opened in 1986 and often features in ExxonMobil’s promotional materials.
However, 47 percent of the CO2 captured over Shute Creek’s lifetime had been sold for enhanced oil recovery, according to a 2022 study by U.S.-based think tank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Another 50 percent of the gas was vented back into the atmosphere when it couldn’t be sold. Just three percent was stored.
The meeting notes did not record any discussion of these caveats.
“CCS is technically complex and difficult for anyone but industry experts to fully understand,” said Lindsey Gulden, a former ExxonMobil climate and data scientist. “That means it can be easily spun to give cover to the oil industry as they attempt to navigate the growing public concern over climate change.”
ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.
dizzy: A new government was elected 4 July 2024 while the lobbying will mostly have been with the previous Tory government. It follows that our current government has accepted and progressed with the previous government’s decisions. Is it fair to accuse them of simply rubber-stamping the previous government’s decisions?
Experienced climbers scale a rock face near the historic Dumbarton castle in Glasgow, releasing a banner that reads “Climate on a Cliff Edge.” One activist, dressed as a globe, symbolically looms near the edge, while another plays the bagpipes on the shores below. | Photo courtesy of Extinction Rebellion and Mark Richards
Geenpeace activists set up a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters amid the company’s profits announcement on July 27, 2023 in London, England. (Photo: Handout/Chris J Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
“We cannot let countries and communities that have done the least to cause climate change pay the price for Shell’s greed,” one green group said.
A little more than a week after Earth endured its four hottest days on record, fossil fuel giant Shell announced higher second-quarter profits than expected at $6.3 billion.
The company also announced a new share buyback program worth $3.5 billion through September, CNBC reported.
“It is shameful that Shell, as one of the world’s largest and most profitable fossil fuel companies, continues to reap billions in profits off the back of its planet-wrecking oil and gas operations,” Chiara Liguori, the senior climate justice policy adviser at Oxfam Great Britain, said in response to the news. “At a time when the company should be taking strong action to cut emissions it is instead weakening its climate targets and continues to invest in new oil and gas projects, in favor of short-term shareholder returns.”
“That the profits of two companies alone can outweigh the GDP of six countries already being battered by the climate crisis lays bare the shameful inequity at the heart of the fossil fuel economy.”
Shell’s announcement covers the months of April through June 2024. While the company made 19% less than it did during the first three months of the year, it made $400 million more than London Stock Exchange Group predicted for the quarter, according to CNBC.
A Global Witness analysis concluded that Shell paid $23 billion to shareholders since June 2023. Every month in that same 13-month period saw temperatures averaging 1.5°C or more above preindustrial levels—the more ambitious temperature goal enshrined in the Paris agreement. Each month in that stretch was also the hottest of its kind on record.
“Wildfires raging across the Arctic Circle and temperature records breaking by the day should be a wake-up call,” Greenpeace U.K. said on social media. “But Shell continues to bank billions from digging up climate-wrecking fossil fuels.”
Shell’s announcement caps a month in which high global temperatures fueled a number of extreme weather events. July began with Hurricane Beryl forming as the earliest ever Category 4 and Category 5 Atlantic hurricane on record, before it devastated several Caribbean islands. Last week, a fast-moving wildfire forced more than 20,000 people to flee historic Jasper in the Canadian Rockies before it destroyed nearly a third of the town. The same week, Typhoon Gaemi dumped more than 1,000 millimeters of rain on Taiwan in less than 24 hours.
“As people flee wildfires in Canada, floods in Taiwan, and rebuild in the wake of Storm Beryl, Shell is doubling down on fossil fuels, U-turning on renewables, and profiting to the tune of billions from an intensifying climate crisis,” Alice Harrison, head of Fossil Fuel Campaigns at Global Witness, said in a statement.
Shell’s announcement also comes days after BP posted $2.8 billion in second-quarter profits.
Global Witness calculated that BP and Shell’s second-quarter profits combined would be enough to pay one-tenth of the $100 billion in climate-related loss and damage money that developing nations have requested by 2030.
At the same time, the two oil giants’ profits over the past year—£31.2 billion ($39.8 billion)—exceed the £27.7 ($35.3) billion combined gross domestic products of the six nations most impacted by Beryl: Barbados, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, Jamaica, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada, according to Global Justice Now.
“That the profits of two companies alone can outweigh the GDP of six countries already being battered by the climate crisis lays bare the shameful inequity at the heart of the fossil fuel economy,” Izzie McIntosh, climate campaigner at Global Justice Now, said in a statement. “People in the Caribbean devastated by the impacts of Hurricane Beryl are left to pick up the pieces, while rich shareholders and fossil fuel CEOs get to rake in the profits, removed from the chaos they’ve played a leading role in creating.”
The climate justice organizations called for governments to take action to stop fossil fuel companies before they can further destabilize Earth’s climate.
“We need accountability and a government that isn’t afraid to stand up to them—it can start by introducing measures to make these polluting megacorporations pay up for the climate damage they’ve caused in the Global South, as well as a fossil fuel phaseout,” McIntosh continued.
Harrison agreed: “We can’t keep letting polluters off the hook. Governments should be holding fossil fuel majors to account for the crisis they created and forcing them to pay for the damage they are inflicting on millions of families around the world.”
Oxfam G.B. and Greenpeace U.K. recommended policies for the United Kingdom—where Shell and BP are headquartered—specifically.
“As global temperatures and the huge costs of tackling the climate crisis continue to rise, the U.K. government has a chance to ensure those most responsible for contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions, like Shell, are held to account by taxing them more,” Liguori said. “This could help raise the vital funds needed to ensure a fair switch to clean, renewable energy in the U.K. as well as fulfilling our international commitments to support communities worst-hit by climate change to adapt and recover.”
Greenpeace concluded: “We cannot let countries and communities that have done the least to cause climate change pay the price for Shell’s greed. The new Labour government must prove it is different to its predecessor by reining in the fossil fuel giants and imposing bold new taxes on polluters to force them to pay their climate debts at home and abroad.”
A host of parliamentarians were previously employed by agencies with fossil fuel clients.
At least 24 newly elected MPs used to work for public relations, consultancy and lobbying firms that have a history of representing oil and gas companies, DeSmog can reveal.
A DeSmog analysis of the MPs entering Parliament after the 2024 general election found that two dozen had a background working for oil and gas giants, coal power station conglomerates, as well as other highly polluting clients.
The findings have sparked concerns that fossil fuel interests in Parliament may influence policy-making.
“I entered politics after working as an engineer in the renewables industry exactly because I could see we had the technology to make the transition to clean and green energy, but we were lacking the political will to make it happen,” said Green Party co-leader and Bristol Central MP Carla Denyer.
“Part of what stops this transition from occurring is the embedded influence of the fossil fuels industry in politics.”
Labour’s new Ossett and Denby Dale MP Jade Botterill started working at lobbying firm Portland after her parliamentary candidacy was announced in September 2023. Portland’s clients include oil major BP, French energy firm EDF, Heathrow Airport, and Chinese state-owned oil company CNOOC. Another Labour MP – Laura Kyrke-Smith – worked for Portland several years ago. She told DeSmog that she didn’t represent any oil firms while working for the company.
Portland told DeSmog that they “do not comment on client relationships”.
At least three new Labour MPs – Oliver Ryan, Mary Creagh, and Steve Race – previously worked for Lexington Communications, a lobbying firm that works for oil giant Phillips 66, the International Airlines Group (IAG), and Eren Holding, a firm that runs coal-fired power stations in Turkey.
New Conservative MP for Bromsgrove Bradley Thomas spent at least five years working for Phillips 66, latterly as a strategy lead, before becoming an independent consultant to the sector.
Almost a third of Labour’s new MPs have a background working in communications and lobbying, according to the Sunday Times, a similar share to the Conservatives. Due to the UK’s limited transparency rules around lobbying, it’s often impossible to know whether these individuals worked on behalf of oil and gas clients.
However, we do know that several other major lobbying and consultancy firms with fossil fuel links – in addition to Lexington and Portland – used to employ a number of new MPs. These include:
Teneo (clients include BHP, Centrica, and EnQuest)
Four Communications emphasised that its work for the Oman Oil Company ended in 2019, though the firm also has offices in the petrostates United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.
In June 2024, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that PR agencies had “aided and abetted” the fossil fuel industry, “acting as enablers to planetary destruction”. He called on these agencies to stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, and to set out plans to drop their existing ones.
“Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet – they’re toxic for your brand,” he said.
All the MPs named in this article were approached for comment.
Gas Lobbyists and Energy Consultants
Several new MPs have also worked for much smaller groups with links to the energy industry. This includes Labour’s new Cannock Chase MP Josh Newbury, who between 2019 and 2022 worked as senior parliamentary officer for the Energy and Utilities Alliance (EUA) – a trade group for the gas industry and fossil fuel boiler manufacturers.
DeSmog revealed in 2023 that the EUA, which is led by former Labour MP Mike Foster, was behind a barrage of negative press attacking heat pumps as a home heating source. Foster has repeatedly labelled pro-heat pump campaigners as a “green cult”.
New Liberal Democrat MP for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire Ian Sollom worked as the principal of StrategicFit, an energy sector strategic consultancy that has worked for the oil major ExxonMobil, and the Chinese state oil firm CNOOC.
Sollom told DeSmog that “as a scientist entering Parliament, I am committed to the phasing out of fossil fuels, and my previous career primarily focused on improving decision making and collaboration between energy companies, regulators and other stakeholders”.
Liberal Democrat MP for Cheltenham Max Wilkinson used to work for Camargue, which lobbied politicians in Westminster on behalf of the oil company Esso while he was employed by the firm.
A spokesperson for the Liberal Democrats stressed that Wilkinson did not work for any oil and gas clients.
Fossil fuel companies have extensive existing ties to Westminster politics. DeSmog revealed that, from the 2019 general election to the start of the 2024 election campaign, the Conservative Party received £8.4 million from oil and gas interests, climate science deniers, and polluting industries.
Meanwhile, a number of leading right-wing think tanks have received direct funding from the fossil fuel industry. Onward, which hosted the most government meetings of any think tank in 2023, receives funding from Shell and BP.
All the agencies named in this article were approached for comment.
Extinction Rebellion protests at BP London. Banner reads big profits before planet
“The world can no longer afford fossil fuel companies putting short-term profits above people and planet.”
The London-based oil giant BP announced Tuesday that it hauled in $2.8 billion in profit during the second quarter of the year as the world faced the consequences of the fossil fuel industry’s business model in the form of record-shattering heat, devastating wildfires, and other weather extremes.
The company’s second-quarter profit surpassed analysts’ expectations and brought its total profit for the first half of 2024 to $5.5 billion. BP on Tuesday also announced a 10% dividend increase, an expansion of its stock buyback program, and a green light for a new drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, even as international scientists say any new fossil fuel production is incompatible with critical warming targets set out by the Paris climate accord.
BP said that once completed, the new floating platform would have the capacity to produce 80,000 barrels of crude oil daily.
Chiara Liguori, Oxfam Great Britain’s senior climate justice policy adviser, said in a statement that “the world can no longer afford fossil fuel companies putting short-term profits above people and planet.”
“It is inexcusable that BP, one of the world’s most polluting and profitable fossil fuel companies, continues to rake in billions of pounds while low-income countries are in urgent need of funds to tackle the devastating impacts of the climate crisis despite doing the least to cause it,” said Liguori. “The costs of inaction are already here with deadly heat waves, wildfires, flooding, and drought, but it is people living in poverty who are left paying the highest price.”
BP’s profit report came weeks after the company, now under the leadership of CEO Murray Auchincloss, announced it would pause new offshore wind projects and put fresh “emphasis on oil and gas amid investor discontent over its energy transition strategy,” as Reuters reported last month. The move came over a year after the company rolled back its plan to curtail oil and gas production.
Extreme weather driven by the burning of fossil fuels, meanwhile, continued to wreak havoc across the globe.
“By the end of the week—which saw the four hottest days ever observed by scientists—dozens had been killed in the raging floodwaters and massive mudslides triggered by Typhoon Gaemi,” Kaplan continued. “Half of Jasper was reduced to ash. And about 3.6 billion people around the planet had endured temperatures that would have been exceedingly rare in a world without burning fossil fuels and other human activities, according to an analysis by scientists at the group Climate Central.”
Izzie McIntosh, a climate campaigner at the United Kingdom-based advocacy group Global Justice Now, said Tuesday that BP’s “mammoth profits” come “at the expense of our climate, communities, and the Global South facing the most brutal impacts of a climate crisis they did not cause.”
“Labour has made some promising signals about a move toward green energy—it now needs to throw its weight behind tackling the rampant profiteering of oil and gas companies,” McIntosh said of the newly elected U.K. government. “It can do this by introducing a windfall tax and other measures to fund the U.K.’s contribution to a globally just fossil fuel phaseout that works for workers and communities in the U.K. and around the world.”
