An updated database shows that more than 1,000 oil and gas companies around the world are planning to expand their planet-wrecking infrastructure.
More than a thousand fossil fuel companies around the world are currently planning to build new liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines, or gas-fired power plants even as scientists warn that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with efforts to prevent catastrophic warming.
That’s according to an updated database released Wednesday by Urgewald and dozens of partner groups. Described as the most comprehensive public database on the fossil fuel industry, the Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL) covers 1,623 companies that are operating in the upstream, midstream, or gas-fired power sector and collectively account for 95% of global oil and gas production.
More than a thousand fossil fuel companies around the world are currently planning to build new liquefied natural gas terminals, pipelines, or gas-fired power plants even as scientists warn that fossil fuel expansion is incompatible with efforts to prevent catastrophic warming.
That’s according to an updated database released Wednesday by Urgewald and dozens of partner groups. Described as the most comprehensive public database on the fossil fuel industry, the Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL) covers 1,623 companies that are operating in the upstream, midstream, or gas-fired power sector and collectively account for 95% of global oil and gas production.
JUST RELEASED The Global Oil & Gas Exit List (GOGEL) with fresh numbers: Despite the climate crisis, almost every upstream company is still developing new oil&gas fields. In addition, 1,023 companies planning new LNG terminals, pipelines, gas power plants. https://t.co/DsBgFMR7QZpic.twitter.com/BCUGpd5PYJ
According to the 2023 GOGEL, 96% of the 700 upstream oil and gas companies in the database are exploring or actively developing new oil and gas fields, projects that Urgewald said “severely jeopardize efforts to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 °C.”
Nearly 540 companies in the database are collectively planning to produce 230 billion barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) over the short term, the database shows.
“The seven companies with the largest short-term expansion plans are Saudi Aramco (16.8 bboe), QatarEnergy (16.5 bboe), Gazprom (10.7 bboe), Petrobras (9.6 bboe), ADNOC (9.0 bboe), TotalEnergies (8.0 bboe) and ExxonMobil (7.9 bboe),” Urgewald noted. “These seven companies are responsible for one-third of global short-term oil and gas expansion.”
The database also shows that fossil fuel companies are planning to expand global LNG capacity by 162%, a significant threat to critical climate targets. A United Nations-backed report published last week warned that fossil fuel expansion plans are “throwing humanity’s future into question.”
Urgewald pointed specifically to the LNG boom in the U.S., which the group said is “cementing its position as the world’s largest export hub for LNG” with 21 new export facilities planned along the Gulf Coast. Those facilities account for more than 40% of worldwide LNG expansion documented in the GOGEL database.
“Most of the fossil gas that will be exported from these terminals stems from the Permian Basin, the heart of the U.S. fracking industry,” Urgewald observed.
The updated database shows that nearly 80 companies—including Exxon, Chevron, and BP—are currently operating in the Permian Basin, located in the U.S. Southwest.
Climate campaigners and experts have also sounded alarm over Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), a planned $10 billion LNG export hub that would ship up to 24 million tons of gas annually once it is completed.
“The fossil fuel industry wants to pave undeveloped wetlands all along the coast with LNG facilities like NextDecade Corporation’s Rio Grande LNG Terminal, Rebekah Hinojosa, a member of the South Texas Environmental Justice Network said Wednesday. “Besides their environmental implications, these plans violate Indigenous sacred lands, and people working in fishing, shrimping, and eco-tourism risk losing their jobs. Our communities refuse to be sacrificed for the fracking industry’s dirty gas exports.”
Industry figures held more than 200 meetings with key politicians in the year following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, new research finds.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak tours a Shell gas plant in Aberdeen in July 2023. Credit: Number 10 (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The UK government’s weakening of its windfall tax on energy profits matched the demands of a high-level lobbying campaign by the oil and gas industry, new research reveals.
Trade body Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), formerly Oil and Gas UK, and its operator members including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, and Equinor, met with ministers at least 210 times in the 12 months following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
The meetings – which include in-person talks with the then Business and Energy Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng and his minister Greg Hands (now the Conservative Party chairman) – are revealed in research by Fossil Free Parliament (FFP), a group campaigning against fossil fuel influence on UK politics.
They form part of a lobbying blitz by fossil fuel firms against the windfall tax, conducted through meetings, drinks receptions, letters, parliamentary groups, and a “fiscal forum” with the Treasury attended by the then chancellor (and now prime minister) Rishi Sunak.
The evidence, published in a briefing today (October 24) and shared exclusively with DeSmog, indicates that certain changes requested by the oil and gas industry were accommodated by the government when developing the scope of the levy.
It comes as Sunak faces criticism for delaying some net zero targets and granting 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences, including Equinor’s Rosebank project. As DeSmog reported in March, the Conservative Party received £3.5 million from fossil fuel and polluting interests in 2022.
A spokesperson for OEUK defended its contact with the government: “We will always champion our industry to all parliamentarians on a cross-party basis and do so in an open and transparent manner.”
Caroline Lucas, Green Party MP for Brighton Pavilion, described the research as “shocking”.
“Fossil fuel giants have been committing countless climate crimes, polluting our planet and reaping obscene profits – while everyone else faces sky-high energy bills and a cost of living scandal,” she told DeSmog.
“This research reveals the extent to which the dirty fossil fuel lobby has been aided and abetted by this Tory government – taking their donations, offering privileged access, and handing over staggering tax breaks and subsidies to carry out yet more climate-wrecking damage.”
Windfall Tax ‘Loophole’
The Energy Profits Levy, known as the windfall tax, was announced by the government in May 2022 to tax energy companies’ billions in excess profits due to the global price spike fueled by Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Then chancellor Sunak said the windfall tax would raise around £5 billion over the next year to help with cost of living. However, when the levy was passed in July 2022, it included a loophole where companies received 91p tax relief for every pound they invest in UK extraction, in what the independent Institute of Fiscal Studies called a “huge tax subsidy” for energy companies.
As of September 2023 the windfall tax had raised £2.6 billion, just over half of what was promised, and following a year of record profits by five oil majors. Between them, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies made a total of £195 billion in profits last year.
The new research indicates this ‘loophole’ came about following a surge in meetings and lobbying between OEUK and its member companies with the government,
In June 2022, the month the windfall tax was being consulted on and drafted, meetings between the government and OEUK and its members nearly doubled from 15 to 29, according to the new research.
In the same month, OEUK also wrote letters to Sunak warning the proposed windfall tax would have a negative impact on oil and gas investments in the UK. The letters also called for an emergency summit, including a meeting of the “fiscal forum”, a talking shop between the industry and the Treasury. OEUK describes the fiscal forum as a tool for “facilitating coherent engagement with government authorities to drive the policy agenda”.
On 20 June, the day before the consultation’s launch, the British Offshore Oil and Gas Industry All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG), which is co-run by OEUK, held a summer reception at the Houses of Parliament. The reception saw speeches from Conservative MP Peter Aldous, the APPG’s chair, and Greg Hands, then a minister in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
At the reception, OEUK’s then chief executive Deirdre Michie gave a speech claiming the windfall tax could “undermine and disrupt” energy investment at a time when the UK needs to focus on “energy security and working for net zero”.
Three days later, Sunak, Hands and exchequer secretary Helen Whately attended an “Oil and Gas Roundtable”. The meeting, also known as a fiscal forum, was held in Aberdeen, Scotland, with OEUK and members including BP, Shell, Equinor, and TotalEnergies. According to a 28 June letter from Michie, the meeting discussed the “negative impact” of the windfall tax “on investor confidence”, while companies warned of its “damage to the UK’s competitiveness”.
Michie wrote: “While we remain disappointed at the decision to create the EPL [Energy Profits Levy], OEUK and our members want to work constructively with you to help rebuild investor confidence and ensure that the EPL is designed and implemented thoughtfully and is fit for purpose.”
OEUK’s concerns appear to have been taken into account by the government.
For example, in Michie’s 28 June letter she insisted that the windfall must tax end in 2025: “Industry needs certainty that the EPL will be terminated by the end of 2025 at the latest and we would hope that ministerial statements will continue to reinforce the timebound nature of the EPL.” A deadline of 31 December 2025 was later included in the EPL bill.
Michie’s letter also requested that the windfall tax should not apply to the Petroleum Revenue Tax (PRT), a tax break that oil and gas companies receive for decommissioning oil rigs, adding: “[we] have written to your officials with detailed proposals on the changes to the draft legislation and hope you will give this significant consideration”. The final windfall tax bill did not apply to PRT, as Michie had requested.
“This research makes it abundantly clear that our government has an open-door policy when it comes to the fossil fuel industry”, said Carys Boughton, a campaigner with Fossil Free Parliament.
“They ask for special treatment; they get special treatment, and the rest of us pay for it – with obscenely high energy bills, and a worsening climate crisis.”
She added: “Our political leaders should be channelling every effort into a just transition from fossil fuels, but this won’t happen until the industry with a vested interest in keeping us all hooked on oil, gas and coal is kicked out of our politics.”
Jeremy Hunt and the ‘Price Floor’
A tranche of additional documents, obtained by Fossil Free Politics and seen by DeSmog, shed further light on the extent of industry lobbying, which continued beyond the introduction of the windfall tax.
After Liz Truss’s disastrous September mini-budget, newly-installed chancellor Jeremy Hunt used his Autumn statement in November 2022 to extend the windfall tax to 2028 and increase it from 25 percent to 35 percent.
OEUK raised its opposition to these changes with Victoria Atkins MP, Financial Secretary to the Treasury, in a meeting on 17 November 2022.
Minutes of the meeting, obtained via a Freedom of Information request, show the body’s chief executive Deirdre Michie telling Atkins that the windfall tax extension “plays into investors being undermined”, and that the 10 percent increase “will impact companies borrowing and projects”.
Michie also complained of a “lack of engagement” with ministers, and brought up “the previous HMT [Treasury] fiscal forum”.
A few weeks later, on 9 December, Hunt hosted a fiscal forum in Edinburgh with OEUK and its members BP, Shell, Equinor, TotalEnergies and others. There he promised “more regular fiscal forum meetings in future”, according to a Treasury press release.
Ahead of the meeting, OEUK said it would urge the government to “scrap the windfall tax on homegrown energy when oil and gas prices fall back to normal levels”. This would mean that if prices drop below a certain point, the windfall tax could be removed before 2028.
Ahead of the Spring Budget in March 2023, OEUK repeated this demand, reportedly writing to Hunt to call for a “trigger price” which “switches off” the windfall tax.
Lobbying continued through the spring. In a meeting on 15 March with Treasury’s Exchequer Secretary James Cartlidge, OEUK’s new chief executive David Whitehouse told Cartlidge that the industry was “extremely disappointed that oil and gas did not get a mention in the budget” and called for more engagement and “a public signal” to “shore up confidence”.
On 9 June, OEUK got its wish. Hunt introduced a “price floor” to the windfall tax, which meant the tax would end before 2028 if wholesale energy prices fall back to normal levels – as OEUK and member companies had been requesting.
‘Cosy Relationship’
When contacted by DeSmog, OEUK did not address the evidence of lobbying specifically on the windfall tax. A spokesperson said the industry body was “proud” to provide a secretariat function to the all-party parliamentary group for offshore oil and gas.
“The offshore sector is a crucial part of the UK economy, supporting over 200,000 jobs in communities across the country and in nearly every parliamentary constituency,” they said.
“Our industry is playing a vital role in the UK’s low-carbon energy future and paid £11 billion in production taxes in 2022/23. It has paid a total of £400 billion in taxes over the lifetime of the basin.”
Shell referred DeSmog to OEUK for comment. All other companies named in this story were also approached but had not responded by publication.
The Conservative Party, Cabinet Office, and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero were also contacted for comment.
Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift, a North Sea campaign and research group, said the findings revealed the latest in the industry’s “long enjoyed unwarranted influence over our politics”.
“This is an industry that has made obscene amounts of money while millions of ordinary people – older and disabled people, families with young children – have struggled to heat their homes,” she said. “That they then lobbied in private against a windfall tax designed to claw back some of these profits, is disgusting if unsurprising.”
“The cosy relationship between government and profiteering oil and gas companies needs to end, not just for the sake of everyone facing unaffordable energy bills, but for a liveable climate too.”
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.
Almost 100 universities that have pledged to shed ties to the fossil fuel industry still bank with financial institutions that have collectively provided $419 billion (£345 billion) to polluting interests between 2016 and 2022.
The new research, conducted by campaign group Make My Money Matter and obtained using Freedom of Information requests, shows that 95 universities still hold a bank account with one of five leading global fossil fuel funders: Barclays, HSBC, Santander, NatWest, and Lloyds.
These banks have supplied billions in financing to Shell and BP, which this year scaled back their climate targets, as well as to other oil and gas firms such as ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies. Barclays was the bank of choice, used by nearly three quarters (73 percent) of the universities.
Barclays was the largest European financier of fossil fuels between the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016, which set a goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C, and 2022. The British bank propped up the oil and industry with $190.5 billion (£157 billion) in funding during this time, according to the annual Banking on Climate Chaos report from the climate campaign group Rainforest Action Network (RAN).
This story comes after DeSmog revealed earlier this month that UK universities have accepted £40.4 million in funding from fossil fuel companies since 2022. Students across Europe have protested at schools and universities since returning for the new academic year. In the UK, activists from Just Stop Oil have renewed their campaigning on campuses, targeting University College London, Birmingham, Sussex, Falmouth, and Exeter.
Over 100 universities across the UK, representing 65 percent of the higher education sector, have pledged to divest from the fossil fuel industry since 2014. Over 50 are yet to make any public commitments.
Make My Money Matter says that it will be writing to universities and calling on them to ensure that their divestment commitments are not being undone by their banking choices.
“Divesting from fossil fuels while banking with Barclays is hypocritical and performative,” said Jo Campling, welfare and sustainability officer at Sheffield University Students’ Union. “Universities claim they are striving for a better future by educating their students yet they continue to provide legitimacy to the financial institutions ignoring universities’ own scientists and driving us ever closer to irreversible climate breakdown.”
‘More Needs to be Done’
The universities that have held accounts with Barclays include Bristol, one of the “greenest universities in the UK”, University College London (UCL), the UK’s largest higher education institution by student population, and the University of Glasgow, the first UK university to commit to fossil fuel divestment.
Researchers analysed the period between April 2021 and April 2023. The threshold for a ‘banking relationship’ includes a current or deposit account held within the period, but excludes other services such as loans, credit facilities, or currency exchanges.
In 2022, Barclays was a major backer of unconventional oil projects, such as Arctic extraction and extraction from tar sands. The latter emits up to three times more global warming pollution than producing the same quantity of crude oil.
As of late 2022, following pressure from investors, Barclays has agreed to scale down its financing of oil sands operations. However, the new research shows both Barclays and HSBC remained among the top 10 (seven and eight respectively) global financiers of new fossil fuel expansion projects.
Barclays is facing heavy criticism for its ongoing role in facilitating climate breakdown, and its annual general meeting in May was disrupted by climate activists from Extinction Rebellion.
A spokesperson for Barclays told DeSmog: “Aligned to our ambition to be a net zero bank by 2050, we believe we can make the greatest difference by working with our clients as they transition to a low-carbon business model, reducing their carbon-intensive activity whilst scaling low-carbon technologies, infrastructure and capacity.
“We have set 2030 targets to reduce the emissions we finance in five high-emitting sectors, including the energy sector, where we have achieved a 32 percent reduction since 2020. In addition, to scale the needed technologies and infrastructure, we have provided £99 billion of green finance since 2018, and have a target to facilitate $1 trillion in sustainable and transition financing between 2023 and 2030.”
Peter Vermeulen, chief financial officer at the University of Bristol told DeSmog that the university takes its “climate commitments seriously” and engages with major suppliers, including banks, “to see where positive improvements and changes can be made”.
Vermeulen added that, “I, like many others, am disappointed in Barclays’s climate performance, and that they only put a serious climate plan in place in 2020. In my previous role I actively engaged with Barclays on their lack of progress in this area and witnessed improvement. More needs to be done and for that reason, since joining the University of Bristol this summer, I will step that up even further, with university, staff, and student representatives involved in this.”
Rainforest Action Network has calculated that the world’s biggest banks poured $673 billion (£554 million) into fossil fuels in 2022, while DeSmog revealed in May that four in five bank directors at the six largest banks in the U.S. have ties to polluting companies and organisations, including major fossil fuel firms.
Commenting on the findings of the Make My Money Matter report, Nat Gorodnitski from Students Organising for Sustainability said: “If we want to stop the worst effects of climate change, we need to end fossil fuel funding. Banks are the biggest funders by a long way and rely heavily on the higher education sector for recruitment, reputation, and business, while their fossil fuel financing contradicts academic research, university policies, and students’ needs.
“This gives students and universities the unique power to pressure banks to end their fossil fuel financing in a meaningful way, and call for a shift to funding sustainable energy.”
A spokesperson for HSBC said: “Supporting the transition to net zero and engaging with clients to help them diversify and decarbonise is critically important to us. We are committed to aligning our financed emissions to net zero by 2050.”
A University of Glasgow spokesperson that the university “is committed to doing our part to tackle the climate emergency. In 2014, we pledged to divest our holdings in companies involved in the oil and gas sectors over a 10 year period, and have already achieved this. We have also set an ambitious target to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Our socially responsible investment policy is regularly reviewed.”
Extinction Rebellion occupy Lloyds of London insurance companies 18 October 2023.
Ten City of London insurance companies are targeted by activists calling on them to stop insuring West Cumbia coalmine and East Africa Crude Oil PipelineNOW!
Hundreds of protesters occupied City of London offices of ten Lloyd’s of London insurers demanding they rule out insuring the proposed West Cumbria coal mine and the East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).
The occupations started as a huge crowd gathered outside Standard Bank. The protests are in collaboration with Fossil Free London’s “Oily Money Out” mass action – at which Greta Thunberg was arrested yesterday – and in solidarity with Extinction Rebellion Gauteng in South Africa. In Johannesburg activists were recently met with brutality by security personnel hired by Standard Bank as they peacefully called for dialogue to end the financing of new coal projects.
The protesters marched waving banners saying “Don’t Insure EACOP” and “Don’t Insure West Cumbria Mine” to three high profile buildings including the “Walkie Talkie” where in a coordinated swoop, activists occupied the office foyers of Ascot, Talbot, Chaucer, Markel, Allied World, CNA Hardy, Tokio Marine Kiln, Sirius International and Lancashire Syndicates. The activists are staging a sit-in and refusing to leave.
Insurers from Lloyd’s of London have come under increasing pressure to rule out offering insurance to both the West Cumbria coal mine and EACOP, including protests at offices across the UK with hundreds of students entering the job market refusing to work for them.
Claude Fourcroy, a spokesperson for Money Rebellion said: “We are calling on all the banks and insurers behind the West Cumbria mine and East Africa Crude Oil Pipelines to cut their ties now. Both of these projects will fuel climate breakdown. Lloyd’s of London and the insurers in its market sit at the centre of a web of climate wreckers in the City of London, alongside Barclays and HSBC.”
Community members from Cumbria and Uganda joined the protests, sharing the united call to insurers and banks to stop underwriting fossil fuel projects. The UK Climate Change Committee warned that the West Cumbria Mine would increase UK’s domestic emissions and make the government’s legally-binding domestic emissions budgets difficult to meet.
The massive 1443 km East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline will wreak havoc on communities, jeopardise ecosystems and water supplies. and eliminate the possibility of Earth remaining habitable. There can be no new fossil fuels anywhere if global heating is to remain under 1.5C.
Scientists say we are dangerously close to crossing the globally agreed threshold of 1.5C this year. Neither project will proceed without financial and insurance backing.
Andrew Taylor, Coal Action Network said: “West Cumbria Mining Ltd wants to dig coal here right up until 2049 – when we’re supposed to have reached net zero by 2050! They’re not looking at the impact of how burning it would damage the climate and nature. The UK government talks about us having energy security but the truth is, if the mine goes ahead, 85% of the coal would be exported.”
Patience, a youth activist from Fridays for Future Uganda said: “We have gathered here today to demand that insurers cut ties with EACOP. By supporting this deadly fossil fuel project they undermine any climate commitments they have made. People in Uganda are facing human rights violations in the name of this project. This has to end.”
Fossil Free London is simultaneously disrupting the Canary Wharf offices of Total Energies, a majority shareholder in EACOP.
The protests come on the second day of the Fossil Free London “Oily Money Out” protests targeting the Energy Intelligence Forum at the InterContinental Park Lane Hotel in London, where fossil fuel corporations, including Shell, Total and Equinor, are talking to government ministers. The Forum is taking place in the run up to the COP28 Climate Conference, which has already been captured by the fossil fuel industry, with the appointment of Al Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) as the COP28 President.
Banner reads Oily Money Out. Protests London 18 October 2023.
Joanna Warrington, campaigner with Fossil Free London said: “We can’t allow London to welcome the climate-wrecking elite when droughts, floods, and wildfires rage across the world. London’s banks and finance sector have been ignoring all the warning signs while pouring billions into fossil fuel expansion. Their profit is our loss. Financing new fossil fuel developments is incompatible with a safe future.”
