OSLO, April 22 (Reuters) – The board of Norway’s Equinor (EQNR.OL), opens new tab must explain how the company’s plan to raise oil and gas production aligns with its stated commitment to the Paris agreement on curbing climate change, a group of minority shareholders said on Tuesday.
In a resolution to be voted on at Equinor’s May 14 annual general meeting, the minority owners said there were “material inconsistencies” between the company’s climate strategy and the policy expectations expressed by its majority shareholder.
Those expectations, laid out by Noway’s government two years ago, included Equinor setting targets and implementing measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “in both the short and long term” in line with the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Protesters rally outside the summit. Photo: Angela Christofilou
Hundreds of protesters rally outside global energy summit in London
HUNDREDS of protesters rallied outside a global energy security summit in London yesterday, urging Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer “not bow down to the fossil fuel lobby or give in to ridiculous far-right rhetoric.”
Demonstrators demanded that the government deliver a “credible plan” for a just transition for North Sea oil and gas workers as it bans new drilling in British waters.
This includes “grasping the huge opportunity to build out a domestic wind manufacturing sector” alongside investment in ports and setting up a dedicated training fund for offshore oil and gas workers. Stop Rosebank’s Lauren MacDonald said the demonstration was called to ensure “people’s voices are heard above the noise coming from the oil and gas companies and their cheerleaders in the US government.” “The public have made their feelings clear with a million people signing a petition to end drilling and we urge the UK government to listen,” she added.
Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Orcas are pleased that Rosebank and Jackdaw oil fields are blocked.
I’m looking at Rosebank And Jackdaw oil and gas fields in the North Sea. It looks as though the UK government is going to shit on the UK population and especially young people as they so often do.
Since Rosebank and Jackdaw oil and gas fields in the North Sea were blocked by the Scottish Court of Session, the decision falls to the UK government led by Likud Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Rachel Reeves has said
“We said in our manifesto that they would go ahead, that we would honour existing licences, and we’re committed to doing that, and go ahead they will,” Reeves said.
“North Sea oil and gas is going to be really important to the UK economy for many, many decades to come.
“And we want to make sure that fields that have already got licences can continue to exploit those reserves and bring them to market.”
What the Labour Manifesto 2024 says
We will ensure a phased and responsible transition in the North Sea that recognises the proud history of our offshore industry and the brilliance of its workforce, particularly in Scotland and the North East of England, and the ongoing role of oil and gas in our energy mix.
We will embrace the future of energy production and storage which will make use of existing offshore infrastructure and the skills of our offshore workforce. Labour will not revoke existing licences and we will partner with business and workers to manage our existing fields for the entirety of their lifespan. Crucially, oil and gas production in the North Sea will be with us for decades to come, and the North Sea will be managed in a way that does not jeopardise jobs. And our offshore workers will lead the world in the industries of the future.
We will not issue new licences to explore new fields because they will not take a penny off bills, cannot make us energy secure, and will only accelerate the worsening climate crisis. In addition, we will not grant new coal licences and will ban fracking for good.
[I previously published this article on 31 December 2023. It’s a little dated but still a good one.]
In the ‘coming soon’ notice announcing this article I said that “[t]here aren’t any real climate deniers anymore”. I was mistaken and there are a very few people like Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers Corbyn. I’ve only met and spoken with him once but I’m satisfied that he’s genuine in his beliefs despite them being misguided. He and others like him have the right to believe whatever they like and he’s harmless enough – while he may persuade a few people the vast majority will understand that he’s mistaken and wrong.
Image of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reads 1% RICHEST 100% CLIMATE DENIER
So apart from Piers Corbyn and a few similar people, there is no such thing as a climate denier nowadays. The Capitalists profiting from climate destruction have known for 60 years of more that they were profiting from destroying the planet and were forcing future generations to endure intolerable climate conditions, annihilating many thousands of species of plants and animals and generally totally fekking everything.
Governments are controlled, directed, owned by a very few extremely rich and powerful people, the very people that are profiting and maintaining their wealth, power and influence from destroying the planet. According to this perspective we do not exist in a democracy and it is instead a pretence hiding the influence of the rich and powerful. We exist in a plutocracy – we have a wealthy ruling class that politicians serve.
It cannot be accepted that politicians like UK’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak or our expected next Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the like are mistaken true believers like Piers Corbyn believes. Rather they are climate deniers in the sense of the fossil fuel industries – Exxon, Shell and BP – who know fully well that they are destroying the planet but deceive and mislead to continue making a filthy profit. It’s obvious to see that these politician cnuts serve this rich elite’s interests – Tory and Labour UK governments have answered to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, sucking up to him, grateful to accept his orders.
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
Sunak, despite being fully aware of the climate crisis is continuing to destroy the planet. Announcing the go-ahead for the Rosebank oil field he said that he intends to get every last drop of North Sea oil.
President Trump is a climate science denier because he was supported financially by the fossil fuel industry during his re-election campaign. He explicitly called for financial support from the “liquid gold” fossil fuel industry.
Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Orcas comment on killer apes destroying the planet by continuing to burn fossil fuels.
Equinor has retracted a claim that it stores about a million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually at its flagship carbon capture project after DeSmog obtained data showing the real figure was as little as a tenth of that amount.
The Norwegian oil company scrubbed the estimate from its website in November, when presented with official figures showing that it captured 106,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) at its Sleipner carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility in 2023.
Equinor has not captured 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year at the site since 2001, according to the data, provided by the Norwegian Environment Agency.
The company put the reason for the discrepancy between the official figures and its public-facing claim to be capturing “about 1 million” tonnes of CO2 a year down to a failure to update a “static” webpage.
“We have now removed this error from our website and updated this section with the correct information,” Equinor spokesman Gisle Ledel Johannessen said via email.
Equinor has been capturing CO2 from a gas processing plant at the Sleipner gas field in the North Sea since 1996. The field has particularly high concentrations of CO2, which Equinor filters out during the gas purification process and then injects below the seabed.
The project has been cited by carbon capture advocates, and Equinor itself, as evidence that the technology is reliable enough to help meet global climate goals, despite its long history of cost-overruns and failed targets.
A screenshot of Equinor’s website, taken on 13 October, 2024 Credit: Edward Donnelly. The claim has since been removed.
Expansion Plans
Equinor is positioning itself to play a key role in the European Union’s plans to massively increase carbon capture. The bloc has adopted an official target to deploy an annual 50 million tonnes of CO2 storage capacity by 2030 from roughly three million tonnes available across the continent today, though the pace of the existing roll-out is nowhere near on track to achieve that goal.
Norway, not an EU member, is home to almost all of Europe’s operational carbon capture capacity, which is comprised of Sleipner and a similar project also operated by Equinor at its Snøhvit gas field in the Barents Sea. The two sites stored a total of 763,000 tonnes of CO2 in 2023, according to the Norwegian Environment Agency figures, less than half of their combined capacity of 1.7 million tonnes of CO2.
Equinor’s statement that it was capturing “about 1 million tonnes of CO2 each year” at Sleipner alone appears to have first been published on the company’s “carbon capture and storage (CCS)” webpage in 2022, according to archived internet data. That year, the Sleipner field captured 260,000 tonnes of CO2, according to the Norwegian Environment Agency, which regulates the oil and gas industry.
DeSmog asked Equinor for its data on carbon capture at Sleipner in October. When the company declined to provide it, DeSmog obtained the figures from the Norwegian Environment Agency, which collates companies’ self-reported data.
Equinor spokesman Johannessen said that Sleipner had been capturing less CO2 in recent years because of declining gas production at the site.
Credit: Sabrina Bedford.
Broken Equipment
Equinor had previously acknowledged that faulty monitoring equipment at Sleipner caused it to over-estimate the amount of CO2 it was capturing at the field for several years, as DeSmog reported in October. During a more than four-year period from January 2017 through March 2021, the company said that it had captured a cumulative total of about 2.7 million tonnes of CO2 at the site. Equinor later amended the figure to 2.1 million tonnes, about a 28-percent decrease.
The gulf between Equinor’s public claims and Sleipner’s actual performance underscores concerns among climate advocates that the oil industry is hyping the potential of carbon capture as a climate solution to deflect pressure to cut production of fossil fuels.
At least 480 carbon capture lobbyists attended the latest annual UN climate conference in Azerbaijan in November, according to the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law. In October, DeSmog revealed that Equinor had been holding more meetings with ministers to lobby the UK government over CCS than any other company, part of its plans to play a leading role in the country’s carbon capture plans.
Equinor suggested that carbon capture could be the “best-kept secret” for climate action in a 2019 video, concluding that renewable energy sources such as wind and solar were “not enough.” In sponsored content currently viewable on the Financial Times website, Equinor says that CCS “has emerged as one of the key technologies in mitigating global warming” and addresses “misconceptions,” such as concerns over high costs and links to continued oil and gas production.
Ketan Joshi, an Oslo-based climate consultant, said that the way Equinor presents its CCS operations as a climate solution is “misleading” because its existing projects only capture a small proportion of emissions, while total fossil fuel emissions in Norway remain high.
“Equinor uses ‘ambitious’ CCS targets as a way of simulating action without actually performing it,” Joshi said. “They report the amount of CO2 they capture each year and it does not increase.”
*A screenshot of a table showing the amount of CO2 captured at Sleipner provided to DeSmog by the Norwegian Environment Agency. The agency noted in an email that the 2021 volume should be 260 kilotonnes and not 322 kilotonnes, and that it will correct the figure in the next edition. The 106 kilotonne figure (106,000 tonnes) for 2023 was provided separately by email.
CO2 Tax
The Sleipner CCS project was devised by Equinor (then Statoil) in the mid-1990s as a way to reduce its exposure to Norway’s newly implemented CO2 emissions tax. The company established its CCS project at Snøhvit in 2008 also to reduce its tax burden from CO2 released during gas processing.
“Sleipner and Snøhvit are CCS projects with high quality that rightly enjoy worldwide recognition from academia, industry, governmental bodies and science institutions as proven and safe CO2 storages over decades where Equinor and our partners so far have stored over 25 million tonnes of CO2 since 1996,” said Equinor spokesman Johannessen.
He added that over the past five years, the company has “injected 99.7 percent of the CO2 that has been captured on Sleipner into the ground.”
The amount of CO2 captured by Equinor’s two CCS projects is dwarfed by the emissions released by burning the oil and gas sold by the company. In 2023, Equinor recorded a total of 262 million tonnes of CO2 emissions — including the emissions produced by its operations, and the emissions from burning the oil and gas those operations extracted, according to company sustainability data.
In contrast, the company captured and stored a total of about 0.8 million tonnes of CO2 at Sleipner and Snøhvit, more than 300 times less than the amount emitted into the atmosphere by burning its products.
And even with a functioning carbon capture facility onsite, net CO2 emissions at Sleipner far exceeded the amount of the gas that was stored.
The Sleipner offshore platform provides power to several nearby gas fields by burning gas in turbines — a process that released 658,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2023, according to the company’s sustainability reporting. That’s more than six times the 106,000 tonnes of CO2 that Equinor captured and stored from gas processing at Sleipner that year.
To reduce the offshore platform’s CO2 footprint, Equinor announced last April that it would introduce an electrification plan for Sleipner, rather than opting to expand CCS operations at the field. The company is also planning an electrification project to reduce emissions from the gas export facility at Snøhvit.
Government Subsidies
In September, Equinor and partners Shell and TotalEnergies inaugurated the Northern Lights CO2 transport and storage facility near the Norwegian port of Bergen, which the companies say will store 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 a year from industrial sources on the Norwegian mainland at full capacity when it starts operations.
The project is mostly financed by $1.2 billion in Norwegian government subsidies, with an additional $141 million pledged by the European Union.
By 2035, Equinor says it aims to store 30 to 50 million tonnes of CO2 a year from new projects announced in Norway, Denmark, the UK, and the United States — an exponential increase from its current capacity.
While Equinor has signalled that it will need substantial subsidies to go forward with its CCS plans, the company continues to direct most of its investments into extracting more fossil fuels. In August, chief executive Anders Opedal announced up to $6.7 billion a year to fund new Norwegian oil and gas drilling until 2035.
In contrast, Equinor said in November that it will cut its renewable energy division’s workforce by 20 percent — about 250 jobs — citing economic headwinds in the sector.
“At the most basic level, Equinor presents CCS in a similar way to many other major oil and gas companies: a ‘necessary’ part of the climate solutions mix,” said Joshi, the climate consultant. “This is presented alongside the company’s aggressive expansionist agenda: opening many new oil and gas fields.”
Protesters rally outside the summit. Photo: Angela Christofilou
