The Petra Nova Carbon Capture Project is seen on December 20, 2016 in Houston, Texas. (Photo: Marie D. De Jesus/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images)
“The fossil fuel industry delays climate action, distracts from real solutions that would end the fossil fuel era, and does everything in its power to squeeze the last drops of profit from a dying industry, at the expense of all of us.”
Among the world’s wealthiest countries, the U.S. leads the way in spending public money on so-called climate “solutions” that have been proven to “consistently fail, overspend, or underperform,” according to an analysis released Thursday by the research and advocacy group Oil Change International.
The group’s report, titled Funding Failure, focuses on international spending on carbon capture and fossil-based hydrogen subsidies, which continues despite ample data showing that the technological fixes have “failed to make a dent in carbon emissions” after 50 years of research and development.
The report details how five countries account for 95% of all carbon capture spending, with the U.S. investing the most taxpayer money in the technology, at $12 billion in subsidies over the last 40 years.
Norway comes in second with $6 billion going to carbon capture and storage, while Canada has spent $3.8 billion, the European Union has spent $3.6 billion, and the Netherlands has poured $2.6 billion into the technology, with which carbon dioxide emissions are compressed and utilized or stored underground.
“It is nothing short of a travesty that funds meant to combat climate change are instead bolstering the very industries driving it.”
Harjeet Singh, global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, told The Guardian that the subsidies amount to a “colossal waste of money.”
“It is nothing short of a travesty that funds meant to combat climate change are instead bolstering the very industries driving it,” said Singh.
While proponents claim carbon capture and storage reduces planet-heating carbon emissions, OCI notes, it was originally developed in the 1970s “to enhance oil production, and this remains its primary use,” with the technology “barely” reducing emissions.
High-profile carbon capture failures in the U.S. include the Petra Nova project in Houston, Texas, which cost nearly $200 million in taxpayer funds and whose captured emissions were later used for crude oil production, and the FutureGen project, “which swallowed $200 million and never materialized.”
“Investing in carbon capture delays the transition to renewable energy,” reads OCI’s report. “Instead of wasting time and money on technologies that do not work, governments must commit to justly and urgently phasing out fossil fuels before it’s too late.”
Despite the lack of data supporting the use of carbon capture, the group said, countries including the U.S. are “preparing to waste hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on these ineffective technologies, further benefiting the fossil fuel industry.”
OCI highlighted how the U.S. and Canada, while ostensibly fighting the climate crisis, have spent a combined $4 billion in public money to explicitly “pay oil companies to produce more oil,” with the subsidies going to carbon capture for “enhanced oil recovery.”
The report also found that in addition to the $12 billion in taxpayer funds the U.S. has spent on carbon capture and fossil hydrogen—a leak-prone gas produced through energy-intensive processes that cause their own emissions—the government has spent an estimated $1.3 billion on the 45Q tax credit, which allows companies to write off tax for every ton of carbon dioxide they store underground.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) increased the amount given to companies in 45Q tax credits from $35 to $60 per ton, meaning that the subsidy could grow to over $100 billion in the next 10 years.
OCI’s Policy Tracker shows that overall public spending on carbon capture and hydrogen could grow by between $115 billion and $240 billion in the coming decades.
“We need real climate action, not fossil fuel bailouts!” said OCI in a post on social media.
The group’s report also highlights that fossil fuel giants such as ExxonMobil have shifted from carbon capture skeptics to outspoken proponents of the technology—with the company bragging to investors that carbon capture and hydrogen would help its Low Carbon Business Unit make “hundreds of billions of dollars” and grow to be “larger than ExxonMobil’s base business.”
Exxon didn’t launch its carbon capture efforts until 2018, having spent several years and hundreds of millions of dollars on another “climate solution” that ultimately failed: the use of algae to make biofuels.
Since then, Exxon has “pushed for direct government funding for carbon capture, particularly at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE),” successfully lobbying for $12 billion allocated in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill in 2021 for “carbon management research, development, and demonstration.”
Exxon also lobbied for the increased rate of the 45Q tax credit in the IRA and “played a ‘central role’ in drafting a 2019 DOE-sponsored report on carbon capture that determined Congress would need to create an incentive of around $90 to $110 per ton to support carbon capture deployment,” according to OCI.
The Guardian on Thursday reported that Exxon still “chases billions in U.S. subsidies for a ‘climate solution’ that helps drill more oil,” describing how the oil giant hosted an event at the Democratic National Convention earlier this month where senior climate strategy and technology director Vijay Swarup praised the IRA for helping Exxon pursue carbon capture and said: “We need new technology and we need policy to support that technology. We need governments working with private industry.”
Exxon’s enthusiasm for carbon capture, said OCI, is an example of how “the fossil fuel industry delays climate action, distracts from real solutions that would end the fossil fuel era, and does everything in its power to squeeze the last drops of profit from a dying industry, at the expense of all of us.”
One Saturday in April, Dutch engineers manoeuvred a giant drill into position in the reclaimed, industrial extension of the Port of Rotterdam, and began boring a hole under the seawall. Nearby, sections of metal pipe waited to be lowered into the breach.
The operation was a step forward for Europe’s most advanced scheme to capture carbon dioxide (CO2) from industry, then bury the planet-heating gas under the North Sea.
After years of delay, a joint venture known as Porthos, an acronym for Port of Rotterdam CO2 Transport Hub and Offshore Storage, is due to begin operating in 2026. It’s a 1.3-billion-euro joint venture between state-owned gas companies Energie Beheer Nederland (EBN) and Gasunie, and the Port of Rotterdam Authority. The CEOs of these organisations are due to join Sophie Hermans, the Netherlands’ minister of climate policy and green growth, and senior European Union officials, for a ceremony on Monday to toast the start of construction work at the site.
At full capacity, Porthos is expected to handle 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 captured annually from facilities operated by its four dedicated customers: Shell, ExxonMobil, and the hydrogen producers Air Liquide and Air Products. That total is equivalent to roughly 10 percent of the port’s emissions, and 1.5 percent of the Netherlands’ current CO2 output. Once captured, the gas will be pumped under the North Sea throughout a 15-year period, or until the storage space reaches a maximum estimated capacity of 37.5 million tonnes.
The cost to the Dutch taxpayer: up to 4 billion euros in subsidies.
Credit: Leon de Korte/Follow the Money.
Porthos relies on a technology known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS, which uses a chemical process to capture some of the CO2 that spews from a customer’s industrial chimneys. This trapped gas is then condensed and pumped through pipelines to underground storage sites, such as certain kinds of geological formations, or disused oil and gas wells.
Nevertheless, the backers of Porthos, and its much larger sister project Aramis — also being developed by EBN and Gasunie, along with Shell and French oil giant TotalEnergies — see them as the first nodes in a planned network of pan-European CCS infrastructure. The aim is to eventually funnel CO2 captured in the industrial heartlands of Germany, as well as throughout the Netherlands, to hundreds of storage sites under the seabed.
To its critics, however, Porthos is emblematic of the way oil and gas companies are securing subsidies for CCS schemes that present an appearance of climate action — but are never likely to attain the massive scale needed to make a dent in global emissions.
As Europe’s flagship project, Porthos is emerging as a litmus test for a critical question in the fight against climate change: Will carbon capture actually help reduce the emissions fuelling the crisis? Or will government backing for these technologies instead serve to preserve the fossil fuel business models that caused it?
Sections of pipe for the Porthos CO2 pipeline, intended to take captured carbon emissions and inject them under the North Sea, await burial at the Port of Rotterdam. Credit: Michael Buchsbaum.
Ambitious Plans
With intensifying heatwaves, floods and fires underscoring the threat the climate crisis poses to Europe, the EU has agreed to slash its carbon emissions to net zero by 2050, with an interim target of a 90-percent reduction relative to 1990 levels by 2040. Given the scale of that challenge, and in line with lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, policy-makers have assumed a major role for carbon capture projects in cleaning up industry.
“Reducing emissions is not enough,” reads a European Commission website on CCS. “To achieve our climate ambitions, we will also need to capture, utilise and store carbon.”
Climate campaigners argue, however, that the technology has secured official backing in large part because it helps governments persuade voters they are taking climate action, while stopping short of the kind of rapid, fundamental transformation of economies needed to end the use of fossil fuels.
In May, the EU adopted the Net Zero Industry Act, obligating oil and gas producers to develop 50 million tonnes of annual CO2 storage capacity across the continent by 2030 — roughly equivalent to today’s global total. More ambitiously, the act targets approximately 280 million tonnes of annual CO2 storage capacity by 2040, increasing to a staggering 450 million tonnes by 2050.
Environmental groups such as E3G, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and European Environmental Bureau doubt such targets are feasible, given the thousands of kilometres of pipelines that would have to be built, and the dozens of projects that would have to be designed. A lack of technical and geological know-how combined with potential local opposition could also slow fossil fuel companies’ plans.
“The industry needs to commit to genuinely helping the world meet its energy needs and climate goals —which means letting go of the illusion that implausibly large amounts of carbon capture are the solution,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), in the introduction to a report on clean energy transitions for oil companies published in November.
Despite the oil industry often citing scenarios from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that include significant deployments of CCS, the U.N.-backed body also considers the technology the least efficient, and one of the most expensive, climate tools. In their Sixth Assessment report, the IPCC’s scientists wrote that “even if implemented at its full potential, CCS will account for only 2,4% of the world’s carbon mitigation by 2030 due to its low effectiveness and high cost.”
And Europe is nowhere near close to meeting its carbon capture targets. Today, only 2.7 million tonnes of CO2 is being captured annually across the continent, including in Norway and Iceland, according to the IEA. Porthos’ backers are therefore hailing the project as a crucial step towards fulfilling the continent’s decarbonisation plans — starting with its largest port.
“If we want to reach our climate target, we will need CCS,” Willemien Terpstra, CEO of Gasunie, told DeSmog.
Still, even backers of the technology acknowledge that deployment is lagging. To meet the EU’s target of capturing 280 million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2040 would require 651 projects, said Chris Davies, director of industry group CCS Europe. Each would have to capture more than 400,000 tonnes per year, he told DeSmog.
To date, 50 years after the first CCS projects were started in a Texas oilfield, only about 40 projects are operating globally, with the combined potential to capture just over 50 million tonnes of CO2 per year. However, almost 80 per cent of the CO2 being captured is injected underground to pump more oil — which when refined and burned, adds more CO2 into the atmosphere.
While there is no estimate as to how long it would take to construct hundreds of projects, it is clear that time is running out, Davies said.
Capturing this amount by 2040 requires that construction on all these projects begin no later than early 2038: “So we have less than 5,000 days,” said Davies.
Since Porthos’ backers took a final investment decision last year, no other CCS project “has been given the green light to put a shovel in the ground”, he added.
Cleaning up the Quayside
With docks and quays stretching from its old town centre to the ocean over 40 kilometres away, the Port of Rotterdam covers an area almost twice the size of Manhattan, and handles nearly 440 million tonnes of freight each year, roughly the equivalent of more than 1,200 Empire State Buildings stacked on top of each other.
Not only is Rotterdam a massive cargo port, it’s also one of the largest hubs for energy in Europe, including oil. Counting oil, coal, and liquefied natural gas, the port boasts that some 13 per cent of all the energy used throughout Europe passes through it.
Most of the oil is destined for one of the port’s four refineries, including the giant Shell Pernis facility, as well as sites run by BP and Exxon. (Reducing emissions from the refineries is one of Porthos’ key aims).
All this activity generates tremendous amounts of carbon pollution: The port emitted 20.3 million tonnes of CO2 in 2023.
The port intends to slash its emissions by 55 per cent by 2030, then achieve climate neutrality by 2050.
The port argues that it can reduce its emissions to its target of 9.3 million tonnes by 2030 by:
Storing up to 5.8 million tonnes of emissions annually by the end of the decade through its Porthos and Aramis projects
Reducing emissions by another 5.7 million tonnes by shutting down, as legally required, itsremaining coal-fired power plants by 2030, building on savings made by previous coal plant closures
Greening its operations with electrification, and “green” hydrogen made with wind and solar
“Porthos and Aramis by far contribute the most to the Netherlands’ CO2 reduction targets…the Dutch goals cannot be met without those projects,” Hans Coenen, Executive Board member of energy company Gasunie, told Follow the Money, the Dutch investigative journalism platform that co-published this story with DeSmog.
The Port of Rotterdam’s only real CO2 reductions so far stem from the shuttering of several coal-fired power plants . Credit: Michael Buchsbaum.
Taxpayers Foot the Bill
Crucially, Porthos will not be capturing any CO2 itself, instead handling and storing CO2 captured by Shell, Exxon, Air Liquide and Air Products. Porthos itself consists of a new 30-kilometre pipeline system leading to a compression station. From there, CO2 will be pumped to a repurposed gas drilling platform 20 kilometres offshore, and injected into a depleting gas field for final storage.
To ensure emissions are captured, in 2021, the Dutch government allocated Shell, Exxon, Air Liquide and Air Products a combined 2.1 billion euros via its SDE++ scheme to subsidise company decarbonisation projects.
As it stands, under a long-running scheme known as the European Emissions Trading System (ETS), these companies are already required to buy credits for each tonne of CO2 they emit.
Although the credits currently trade at just under 69 euros per tonne, the price could almost triple by 2035, according to BloombergNEF.
By disposing of some of their emissions via Porthos, its customers save money by having to purchase fewer credits.
But, if buying ETS “emission certificates” is cheaper for them than storing the gas via Porthos, then the Dutch government will make up the cost difference using up to 2.1 billion euros allocated under the SDE++ scheme.
This means that whatever happens, the companies face limited risk, and potentially large savings, if they capture emitted CO2 instead.
The port says this arrangement enables the companies “to cut back their carbon emissions without weakening their respective competitive positions.”
Alternatively, without state support, “Porthos would not have gotten off the ground and this project would not have been able to contribute to achieving the climate objectives,” Ellen Ehmen, Exxon’s community relations manager in the Netherlands, told DeSmog.
Combining various other EU and Dutch government subsidies associated with the project, with the 1.3 billion euro cost to state-owned companies to build it, and up to 2.1 billion in carbon capture subsidies, the overall cost to the state could approach or even exceed 4 billion euros.
In other words, Dutch and European taxpayers are picking up the bill for cleaning up these highly profitable companies’ carbon pollution.
In March, the Netherlands Court of Audit warned in a report that the way the project has been structured means that the state has assumed a disproportionate level of risk relative to industry.
Coenen, of Gasunie, says that he wasn’t surprised by these findings: “We decided deliberately to accept a low return on investment on Porthos, because we find it important to kickstart the project.”
Experimental Projects
Many climate advocacy groups, academics and policy experts have long warned of the dangers of relying on carbon capture projects, arguing that they provide fossil fuel companies with a justification for pumping ever more oil and gas.
Seeking to allay those fears, the European Commission advised in February that carbon capture should only be used in sectors where industry argues that emissions are particularly difficult or costly to cut, for example steel, cement, aluminium, chemicals and waste-to-energy.
But Porthos’ customers are using carbon capture for very different purposes: they’re either developing never-before attempted “low-carbon” projects that may be deployed at some point in future, or capturing a portion of the emissions now being generated by producing hydrogen used in the port’s oil refineries.
Shell, the first company to agree to partner with Porthos, is slated to become the project’s largest single customer, having committed to deliver 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 annually — captured mainly from its sprawling Pernis refinery complex, Rotterdam’s biggest. Shell also pledged to capture 820,000 tonnes a year from its to-be constructed biofuels facility, which is designed to produce so-called sustainable aviation fuel, as well as renewable diesel made from waste oil.
This so-called HEFA (hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids) plant is “essentially where the Porthos project starts,” said Nico van Dooren, director new business, hydrogen infrastructure, transport and storage with the Port of Rotterdam, during a media tour of the Porthos project in May.
Carbon capture “is the low hanging fruit,” Shell spokesperson Marc Potma said during the tour. “We have always said we believe in CCS for the future, but it’s never going to be the only answer. One must also invest in renewable sources, which is why we invested in the biofuels factory.”
Fellow oil and gas major Exxon’s CCS plans at Porthos are also highly experimental. Exxon says it plans to capture CO2 from a pilot project to test a new technology known as carbonate fuel cells — which the company says could help capture CO2 from industry more efficiently than existing methods, while also generating electricity, heat and hydrogen. This technology has never been proved at scale.
Also the recipient of EU funds, Exxon’s pilot plant is expected to be constructed in 2025, and start operations in 2026. Unlike Shell, Exxon has not announced any plans to use Porthos to capture emissions from its own oil refinery at the port.
Porthos’ two other customers are both large-scale hydrogen manufacturers who are producing the gas for use in oil refining — today one of hydrogen’s main uses.
As part of its participation in Porthos, U.S.-based Air Products announced in November it would build a carbon capture project at its existing hydrogen production facility in Rotterdam. Billed as the largest such facility in Europe, the project aims to help the company more than halve its CO2 emissions within the Port, while supplying most of the resulting hydrogen (known as “blue” hydrogen since some of the CO2 generated during the production process will be captured) for use in the nearby Exxon refinery.
Just weeks later, in December 2023, French rival Air Liquide announced it would also retrofit the company’s existing hydrogen facility in Rotterdam with carbon capture, using a proprietary technology that has only been tested at a smaller facility in Port-Jérôme-sur-Seine, France.
Giant new wind turbines tower over Rotterdam’s oil refineries, holding out the promise of an emissions-free future as they replace coal-fired power. Credit: Michael Buchsbaum.
Aramis Following Porthos
As workers dig trenches and bury Porthos’ pipelines around Rotterdam’s port, Shell and TotalEnergies — together with Gasunie and EBN — are working on the larger Aramis project. They want to funnel and bury CO2 emissions captured in Germany, Europe’s biggest emitter, and send them via a yet-to-be-built pipeline project known as the Delta Rhine Corridor.
By 2028, two years after Porthos is due to come online, the first phase of Aramis is scheduled to transport up to 7.5 million tonnes of CO2 for storage — also thanks in part to EU subsidies.
To connect Rotterdam to Belgium, Gasunie is also working on a so-called Delta Schelde Corridor. “It’s going to be one interconnected system in order to help our industry,” Gasunie’s Coenen told Follow the Money.
Signalling EU support, in mid-June, the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency, or CINEA, awarded Aramis 124 million euros in subsidies under the CEF Energy fund. CINEA also granted 33 million euros in funds to another planned Rotterdam CCS hub, known as CO2next.
The bigger question, however, is whether these projects will be completed on time.
At the end of June, the then Dutch Minister of economic affairs and climate policy, Rob Jetten, told parliament that the Delta Rhine Corridor pipelines wouldn’t be completed before 2032 — dealing a blow to the pace of CCS development.
In early July, Shell “temporarily” paused construction of its crucial biofuels plant that is supposed to produce 820,000 tonnes a year. Shell now says production will only begin “towards the end of the decade,” said Shell spokesperson Wendel Broere.
Sections of the Porthos CO2 pipeline are now being buried around Rotterdam’s industrial port. Credit: Michael Buchsbaum.
A Temporary Solution?
Regardless of when they come online, Porthos and the other planned Dutch CCS projects are generally presented as temporary solutions giving industry time to wean itself off fossil fuels — but how long that transformation will take remains unclear.
With billions of euros being invested, “you just have to count on a few decades,” Gasunie’s Coenen said.
Even as Porthos, Aramis and similar projects inch forward, further questions loom: Who will pay the enormous cost of rolling out the network of carbon capture facilities and pipelines needed to ferry CO2 from Europe’s industry to disposal sites in the North Sea via Rotterdam? And can such a project be completed in anything like the timeline demanded by the EU’s carbon capture targets?
Another unknown is how investing in these and other CCS projects will lead to a reduction in overall emissions — particularly since so many planned CCS projects involve building new fossil fuel infrastructure, such as gas-fired power stations or blue hydrogen facilities, rather than retrofitting existing industries. It is also unclear how subsidising industries to adopt CCS will compel fossil fuel companies to accelerate the shift to renewables.
Berte Simons, business unit director of CO2 transport and storage systems at EBN, the Dutch state-owned gas company, said that companies not only have to start capturing emissions, but stop producing them.
“There needs to be an end date to using CCS from fossil sources,” she said. “The sooner [fossil fuel companies] are able to green their portfolio, the quicker they can start with that, the better.”
For many climate advocates, the danger is that carbon capture will simply prolong business as usual — while soaking up billions of euros in subsidies.
Relying on CCS “isn’t a sensible climate mitigation strategy or even a proper carbon management strategy,” Lili Fuhr, deputy director of the Washington D.C.-based Center for International Environmental Law’s Climate and Energy Program, told DeSmog. “It’s really an escape hatch for an industry with its back against the wall faced with an energy transition that is gaining support and is becoming a reality because renewable energies are so cheap.”
This story was corrected on August 29, 2024 to clarify that the cost to taxpayers could be “up to” 4 billion euros (rather than “at least”), and show the various forms of subsidy included in that figure.
The UK government has today (Thursday) confirmed it will not challenge the judicial review brought against the Rosebank oil and gas development.
Campaign groups Uplift and Greenpeace launched legal action against the approval of the West of Shetland development late last year.
They claimed the decision made by the former UK government was “unlawful” as it failed to consider the impact of burning the fossil fuels extracted from the development during its lifetime.
Although the new Labour administration said it would not be contesting the legal case, it does not mean the licenses have been withdrawn.
However, it leaves questions for the future of the controversial development.
dizzy: The oil companies involved in the Rosebank (and Jackdaw) fields can contest the judicial review. However, this is still a huge step in defeating Rosebank. Well done, all those involved in stopping Rosebank.
Campaigners take part in a Stop Rosebank emergency protest outside the U.K. Government building in Edinburgh, after the controversial Equinor Rosebank North Sea oil field was given the go-ahead Wednesday, September 27, 2023. (Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)
THE bad news is that the typical yearly household energy bill in Britain will rise by about £150 from this autumn.
…
Energy Secretary Ed Miliband, who should know better, put a superficial gloss on the situation by arguing: “The rise in the price cap is a direct result of the failed energy policy we inherited, which has left our country at the mercy of international gas markets controlled by dictators.”
The first part of that statement is spot on in as far as Labour has made a few steps to reverse the Tory barriers to a more sustainable energy policy — although not as many as Miliband would like. And Russian President Vladimir Putin is an unsavoury character but actually he wanted to keep on selling his cheap gas to the Germans and us.
Western oil and energy monopolies have long been in partnership with dictatorial regimes in the Middle East who lack even Putin’s pretensions to democratic accountability.
Labour could tighten up the regulatory regime to control consumer prices, could tax energy profits more, could use the sovereign powers that leaving the EU confers by asserting domestic controls over wholesale energy prices.
But the quickest and best way to put the energy industry at the service of the people is to take it into public ownership, use the profits to retrofit our housing stock to save energy, invest in renewables and keep consumption and prices down.
The broadcaster’s in-house content studio has been paid to promote fossil fuel firms and petrostates with a history of persecuting journalists.
The BBC has produced dozens of films and articles for oil and gas companies, agricultural giants, fossil fuel states, and high-emission transport firms in recent years, DeSmog can reveal.
Experts say the BBC has been “greenwashing” the image of companies and countries contributing to global emissions by trumpeting their dubious climate credentials and promoting their favoured solutions to the crisis.
The content was produced by BBC StoryWorks, a studio that produces videos, podcasts, and articles paid for commercial clients, which it publishes on BBC channels outside the UK.
On its website, BBC StoryWorks boasts that it leverages the reputation of the BBC – “our century-long pedigree as the world’s most trusted storytellers” – to create content for commercial clients “that moves and inspires curious minds, across platforms and across the globe”.
BBC StoryWorks produces traditional adverts for its clients, as well as content “with an editorial style” (known as “branded” or “native” content).
Branded content appears outside the UK on the BBC website – the most viewed news platform in the world – and on its non-UK broadcast channels, in a similar format to normal editorial output. However, branded content promotes the paying client and typically features interviews with the client’s senior executives. It is only distinguished by a disclaimer that it has been paid for by an external organisation.
BBC Studios – which includes StoryWorks – generated £1.8 billion of sales in the year 2023/24, according to the broadcaster’s annual accounts. The BBC‘s financial deficit is projected to reach nearly £500 million next year, with the licence fee – its primary funding source – having been frozen for several years by the last Conservative government.
In recent months, the BBC has created content for a number of oil and gas companies, including the French fossil fuel company Engie, which owns a number of coal-fired power plants and relies heavily on gas for its energy production.
BBC StoryWorks has also produced content for liquified natural gas (LNG) companies, and has touted the energy source as a cleaner alternative to other fossil fuels. This is despite experts warning that the booming LNG industry could contribute more heavily to the climate crisis than the ongoing use of coal, the most carbon-intensive fossil fuel.
Agriculture accounts for 21 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and BBC StoryWorks has produced films for some of the world’s biggest food and farming firms, including Nestlé and Bayer, often promoting the disputed green technologies backed by the industry. As previously revealed by DeSmog, BBC StoryWorks has produced dozens of documentaries sponsored by the pesticide giant Corteva, publicising the technologies developed and sold by the firm.
Petrostates with a history of human rights abuses – including the imprisonment of journalists – have also been promoted by BBC StoryWorks.
An investigation by DeSmog and Drilled previously revealed that many of the world’s most trusted English-language news outlets regularly promote the fossil fuel industry’s narratives on climate-related topics. Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and the Washington Post all have internal commercial studios that create advertising content for fossil fuel firms.
The BBC is committed to science-led climate reporting and in 2021 signed the Climate Content Pledge, promising to do “more and better climate story-telling on screen across all genres.”
However, critics say that BBC StoryWorks is using the broadcaster’s reputation – including its role as a public service broadcaster – to make money from commercial content that often flouts its editorial values.
“The contracts to make this sort of content are won on the back of the BBC’s reputation as an honest and impartial broadcaster,” Patrick Howse, the BBC’s former Baghdad bureau chief, told DeSmog. “Accepting money from sources like this, to make content like this, risks undermining the BBC’s own hard-won reputation and will ultimately put it on the wrong side of history.
“This is a huge disservice to the BBC’s audiences, and a betrayal of the many brave and conscientious BBC journalists around the world who see holding power to account and telling the truth as their raison d’etre.”
Last year was the warmest year since global records began in 1850. The world’s foremost climate science body, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has said that “immediate and deep emissions reductions” are needed “across all sectors” to limit global warming to 1.5C – the global target established by the 2015 Paris Agreement.
In June 2024, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that advertising agencies had “aided and abetted” the fossil fuel industry, “acting as enablers to planetary destruction”.
“Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet – they’re toxic for your brand,” he said.
A BBC StoryWorks spokesperson said that the studio “operates entirely separately from the BBC’s editorial operations” and that its output “is clearly labelled as commercial content”.
However, content labelling doesn’t always help readers and viewers to understand that it has been paid for by a commercial client. A 2018 Boston University study found that only one in 10 people recognised native advertising – which includes branded content – as advertising rather than reporting.
The BBC StoryWorks spokesperson added that, “BBC StoryWorks operates under robust and established governance and is required to comply with the BBC’s guidelines as set out in the publicly available Advertising and Sponsorship Guidelines.
“Central to these guidelines is a commitment to factual accuracy in any piece of content. All of the content cited in this article was approved as compliant with the BBC’s advertising guidelines prior to its publication.”
Fossil Fuel Firms and False Solutions
In April and June, BBC StoryWorks published two articles paid for by Engie, a global energy company with annual revenues of $60 billion, which is part-owned by the French state. The articles promoted Engie’s green credentials, claiming it has a mission “to accelerate the energy transition”, despite the firm’s extensive fossil fuel interests.
Though ENGIE has ambitious renewable development objectives, it plans to expand its LNG terminals in Europe, is one of the top European developers of gas power plants globally, and has agreed to import American shale gas beyond 2040.
Between 2016 and 2022, the firm sold 16 of its coal plants – a 60 percent reduction in its coal capacity. However, Engie chose to sell these assets rather than close them down. This transferred the polluting plants to different owners, meaning that the plants will still contribute to global emissions.
The BBC StoryWorks articles didn’t provide information about the company’s existing polluting activities, or the global need to rapidly scale-down oil, gas, and coal production.
Professor Peter Newell, an academic at the University of Sussex specialising in environmental politics, told DeSmog: “Because branded content looks like regular BBC journalism which the public trust as independent, it compromises the integrity of the organisation and its public role, including to help society respond seriously to the climate crisis.”
In 2021, the broadcaster launched a “Humanising Energy” series “presented by” the World Energy Council, a global forum for sustainable energy development, followed by a second series in 2023.
The two series featured dozens of five-minute films paid for by individual firms, showcasing their supposed climate solutions. These films typically involved one-on-one interviews with people either creating or benefiting from these green innovations, as well as cinematic shots of the technologies being deployed.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks film from its ”Humanising Energy“ series. Credit: BBC
Sponsors of films in the two Humanising Energy series included the fossil fuel companies Engie Brazil, Gasum (the largest distributor of LNG in the Nordic countries), CLP Holdings (which has said it won’t phase out its coal assets before 2040, and hasn’t committed to phasing out its gas assets), Mabanaft, and Invenergy, the energy services firm Voith, and the engine manufacturer Cummins.
All of these films touted the supposed climate credentials of the featured companies, without examining their contribution to global emissions or the viability of the featured technologies.
In January 2024, Cummins agreed to pay a record $1.7 billion fine – the second largest environmental penalty ever in the U.S. – after facing charges that it equipped roughly one million vehicles with devices that bypassed emissions sensors. The company didn’t admit wrongdoing.
Just a few months earlier, BBC StoryWorks produced a film for Cummins boasting of the firm’s efforts to help decarbonise commercial vehicles.
The Invenergy film focused on its construction of an LNG plant in El Salvador. While the content attempted to show how the plant was providing energy and jobs to the local community, it also tried to tout the environmental benefits of natural gas.
During the film, an Invenergy spokesperson suggested that natural gas generates 30 percent less carbon dioxide than other fossil fuels, neglecting the fact that natural gas is composed largely of methane, which is over 80 times more potent than CO2 across a 20 year period. Even relatively small methane leaks during the process of extracting, shipping, and processing natural gas contribute significantly to global emissions.
One of the films in the Humanising Energy series – “The evolution of home energy” – promoted the role of hydrogen in supplying home heating. Yet, while green hydrogen is widely accepted as necessary for decarbonising heavy industry and other sectors where alternative renewable energy sources are unworkable, it is not considered viable for heating homes.
A peer-reviewed assessment of over 50 independent studies in 2024 concluded that hydrogen use in domestic heating is inefficient, costly and resource-intensive compared to other low-carbon options such as heat pumps.
The BBC StoryWorks film was paid for by DNV, a Norwegian company that claims to be “the world’s leading resource of independent energy experts and technical advisors”, including the oil and gas sector. DNV says on its website that it “delivers broad technical expertise and experience to enable hydrogen to play a key role in the energy transition”.
A DNV spokesperson said that, “While DNV does work with oil and gas companies and organisations across renewable energy production, it is not involved in the direct production or distribution of energy… Our approach to energy solutions is rooted in comprehensive research and rigorous testing, and our position as an independent third party is a central part of our identity and our work.”
The Humanising Energy series also featured twofilms advocating for the development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuels (SAFs) – one paid for by the aviation giant Boeing, and one paid for by the energy and chemicals company Sasol alongside the gas company Linde.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks film, sponsored by Boeing, from its ”Humanising Energy“ series. Credit: BBC
SAFs have been criticised as being environmentally damaging and currently economically unviable. The Advertising Standards Authority this month banned a Virgin Atlantic advert for making the “misleading” claim that it had developed a “100 percent sustainable aviation fuel”.
In August 2022, the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) said that the amount of money invested by airlines in SAFs was “insufficient” and that it seemed as though the technology was simply “about burnishing airlines’ images” by inflating their environmental credentials.
Sasol told DeSmog that its SAF initiatives were not an example of greenwashing and that it believes SAFs hold the “promise to be an enabler of our own decarbonisation and contribute to decarbonising aviation.”
Aviation contributes approximately 2.5 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, yet BBC StoryWorks has produced content for a number of airlines in recent months and years, including Uzbekistan Airways (March 2024), China Southern Airline (2022), and Korean Air (2017).
BBC StoryWorks has also worked extensively with other polluting transport companies.
It produced an advertising campaign for the shipping and cruise company Cunard that appeared on BBC StoryWorks social media pages in July 2024. Europe’s 218 cruise ships emitted as much sulphur oxides as one billion cars in 2022.
BBC StoryWorks has also produced brandedcontent for the car company Hyundai, as well as for Lexus, Volkswagen, and Jaguar. In addition, the studio has produced a six-part series paid for by the Indian multinational motorcycle company Royal Enfield.
Transport contributes roughly one quarter of all energy related greenhouse gas emissions, while outdoor air pollution is estimated to cause more than 3.2 million premature deaths worldwide every year.
“This important investigation reveals that BBC StoryWorks has been doing the greenwashing work of major polluting firms driving the climate crisis by obscuring their role and promoting their preferred ‘solutions’, however discredited by science,” Professor Newell told DeSmog.
Greenwashing is when a company falsely brands something as eco-friendly, green or sustainable. In 2017, the BBC itself produced a guide to the “seven ways to spot businesses greenwashing”.
Big Ag Polluters
BBC StoryWorks has also been paid to produce content for major agricultural polluters and their lobbyists. This content has often promoted the technological hacks that food and farming giants claim will reduce the sector’s emissions, rather than the more fundamental changes in production and consumption that scientists say will be crucial in limiting Big Ag’s climate impact.
In 2023, BBC StoryWorks produced an advertising campaign for the pesticides giant Bayer, the world’s second largest crop chemicals company, boasting of the firm’s efforts to facilitate “scientific breakthroughs”.
In addition, as part of a branded content series in late 2023 entitled “The Climate and Us”, BBC StoryWorks was paid by Bayer to produce a film on the digital apps helping farmers to monitor and reduce their emissions.
The film, which featured an interview with Bayer’s vice president of digital farming operations, promoted the firm’s technologies with no additional comment from experts on its efficacy, or Bayer’s stance on climate change.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks film, sponsored by Bayer. Credit: BBC
According to the Pesticides Action Network, over a third of Bayer’s sales derive from products that are highly hazardous to the environment, animal or human health. (The methodology for this classification is strongly disputed by Bayer on the grounds that it uses different criteria to internationally accepted rules).
Bayer told DeSmog that it is “committed to ambitious sustainability goals and has a positive track record while recognising the ongoing challenge.”
Experts say that the overuse of chemical pesticides is harming the future of food production. Biodiversity is in sharp decline across the world, and numbers of birds and pollinators are plummeting in Europe.
Bayer, which makes almost $10 billion in agrochemical sales every year, has also faced millions of dollars in lawsuits over health issues allegedly related to its products, including from farmers.
In 2023, DeSmog revealed that BBC StoryWorks had produced three documentary series and 26 articles – viewed at least 65 million times – sponsored by Corteva, one of the world’s largest pesticide firms.
The BBC said that the Corteva-sponsored content, which focused on sustainable food production, was editorial in nature and not influenced by its corporate client. However, experts said the documentaries gave a “totally biased” picture of global food problems, while the content promoted a number of the technologies developed by Corteva.
BBC StoryWorks also produced two articles in 2023 paid for by Australian Dairy – the country’s industry trade group.
The first article promoted the supposed contribution of milk and dairy to a healthy diet, while the second advocated for “precision farming” – in other words, using technology to ensure that resources are used efficiently and to track climate impacts.
Scientists and health professionals agree that dairy products are not necessary for a healthy diet, and they agree that for people who are able to have a varied diet, lower meat and dairy consumption is healthier than diets higher in milk and dairy.
Experts also doubt that precision farming can be rolled out widely enough to meaningfully reduce agricultural emissions. The environmental group Friends of the Earth has said that: “Faced with global climate and biodiversity emergencies, better ‘optimisation’ of existing production processes cannot possibly go far enough to meet the challenges we face.”
According to a March 2024 Harvard Law paper, which surveyed more than 200 environmental and agricultural scientists, meat and dairy production must be drastically reduced – and fast – to align with the Paris Agreement. The report concluded that global emissions from livestock production need to decline by 50 percent during the next six years, with “high-producing and consuming nations” taking the lead.
Sophie Nodzenski, a senior campaign strategist on food and agriculture at Greenpeace International told DeSmog: “Tinkering with the status quo is no longer an option. Meat and dairy companies are climate killers. The livestock sector is one of the leading sources of human-made methane emissions, which move us faster and further past the 1.5C threshold, worsening global heating.
“Meat and dairy companies must stop misleading the public with pseudo solutions and focus on reducing their livestock herds drastically to bring down emissions instead. This reduction can give us a fighting chance against climate chaos.”
In 2023, BBC StoryWorks also produced content for the world’s largest food and drink company Nestlé, boasting of the company’s efforts to support sustainable farming through “regenerative agriculture”.
The film failed to acknowledge that Nestlé – whose 87.5 million tonnes of annual emissions are similar to those of Chile – spent 14 times more on “marketing and administration” in the last year than it did on regenerative agriculture over the previous five years combined.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks film, sponsored by Nestlé. Credit: BBC
“Nestlé’s strong focus on using regenerative agriculture to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions from livestock farming – one of Nestlé’s main strategies to achieve net zero – is not backed by robust scientific evidence,” Nodzenski said.
“Increasing carbon storage in soils, as well as forests and other vegetation, is necessary, but should not replace a drastic reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from livestock farming – one of the main sources of Nestlé’s emissions.”
The Nestlé film was part of a “Food for Thought” series backed by the trade body FoodDrink Europe, whose members feature major polluters including Cargill, Coca-Cola, and Unilever.
A Nestlé spokesperson said: “We continue to invest in and deliver on our net zero roadmap. By the end of 2023, we had reduced our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 13.5 percent in absolute terms since 2018. Our GHG reduction targets are third-party approved by the Science Based Targets initiative and include a 20 percent absolute cut by 2025 and 50 percent by 2030 covering all sources of agricultural emissions in our supply chain.
“We continue to ramp up our climate efforts using world class research and development, including via the Nestlé Institute for Agricultural Sciences.
“Nestlé has committed to invest $1.2 billion to pay premiums to farmers for ingredients grown using regenerative agriculture practices, provide technical assistance and support investment.”
Petrostates
Over recent years, BBC StoryWorks has also produced content for some of the world’s leading fossil fuel states, many of which have a poor record on human rights and press freedom.
This year’s flagship COP29 climate summit will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan. The country is a petrostate with oil and gas production accounting for roughly half of its GDP and over 90 percent of its exports. The country, run under an authoritarian system with little effective political opposition, plans to increase fossil fuel production by a third over the next decade.
Azerbaijan’s government has also been accused by of a media crackdown by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch ahead of November’s summit, arresting 25 journalists and activists in the past year.
However, since November 2023, BBC StoryWorks has produced several adverts promoting Azerbaijan as a place to visit, while greenwashing its image.
For example, in December 2023, the studio released an advert paid for by the country’s space agency Azercosmos, attempting to show “How digitisation is changing the game for Azerbaijan’s quest for renewable energy.”
The advert was accompanied by an article claiming that Azerbaijan plans to transition “from an oil- and gas-based economy into a thriving modern hub.” The article did not mention the country’s plan to expand fossil fuel production, which contravenes globally agreed efforts to limit rising temperatures.
A screenshot of a BBC StoryWorks advert, sponsored by Azercosmos. Credit: BBC
BBC StoryWorks has also produced content promoting the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the host of the 2023 COP28 climate summit and another petrostate with a poor human rights record.
In 2023, the studio produced a branded content podcast series on behalf of Abu Dhabi Tourism, featuring five 20-minute episodes each “highlighting the message that Abu Dhabi [the capital of the UAE] is a destination for every kind of traveller”.
The series was shortlisted for a 2023 World Media Award and, in the award submission, the BBC said it “challenged preconceived notions and [positioned] the city as a cultural gem worth exploring”. The series was downloaded 115,000 times, according to the BBC.
The UAE derives roughly 40 percent of its income from oil and gas, and this isn’t the only time that BBC StoryWorks has produced content promoting the petrostate.
The story stated that the UAE is “planning to increase oil production to more than five million barrels a day by 2030”, but said that the country “has been looking toward more sustainable energy sources”. It went on to say that “Clean energy projects are coming of age” in the UAE, “from record-breaking solar parks and green hydrogen to waste-to-energy plants”.
The UAE’s overall climate action has been rated as “critically insufficient” by the Climate Action Tracker, an independent scientific project that monitors government climate action and measures it against the Paris Agreement.
Weeks before COP28, the country’s national oil company, ADNOC, awarded contracts worth $17 billion for the development of new offshore gas fields.
The Gulf state also has a poor record on human rights and press freedom. The UAE continues to arrest and imprison activists, academics, and lawyers who speak out against its monarchic rulers. UAE authorities also continue to discriminate against women, LGBTQ communities, and migrants.
According to Reporters Without Borders, “The government prevents both local and foreign independent media outlets from thriving by tracking down and persecuting dissenting voices.”
“The rise of renewable energies in oil-rich regions” article also attempted to promote the ways in which “women are playing an increasing role in the renewable energy sector”. The story cited the fact that women are leading green initiatives in Kuwait, and Jordan.
However, many Gulf states routinely discriminate against women. In Kuwait for example, the country’s personal status laws discriminate against women in matters of marriage, divorce, and child custody.
Despite this, BBC StoryWorks has frequently promoted the country. In December 2023, the studio published an advert from the Kuwait Fund, the country’s state-run development agency, boasting of its efforts to help “disadvantaged regions, women and minorities”.
Reporters Without Borders states that Kuwait’s censorship laws prohibit journalists “from criticising the government, the emir, the ruling family, its allies or religion”. In particular, it is “difficult for journalists to tackle migrant worker rights, women’s rights and corruption.”
Oil and gas revenues account for roughly 60 percent of Kuwait’s GDP.
BBC StoryWorks has also produced content for the petrostate Qatar, promoting the country as a tourist destination despite its record of discriminating against women and minorities.
BBC StoryWorks has a history of working for repressive regimes, including China. The U.S. publication Deadline reported in December 2022 that BBC StoryWorks had partnered with at least nine Chinese state-affiliated bodies, including a media outlet banned from broadcasting in the UK.
“Those commissioning and paying for this content are deliberately using the BBC’s brand to greenwash or whitewash their own reputations. It’s an exercise of cynical manipulation,” the BBC’s former Baghdad bureau chief Patrick Howse told DeSmog.
“Commissions like this are lucrative and therefore attractive to a corporation that has been deliberately and severely financially squeezed by the UK government over a long period. This has forced the BBC to seek money from wherever it can find it, and this poses a risk to its editorial independence and honesty, which will ultimately undermine the trust of the BBC’s audience.”
