fossil fuel industry

Influential Conservative Think Tank’s Funders Include BP, Shell and Equinor

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Extinction Rebellion NL image reads STOP FOSSIELE SUBSIDIES
Extinction Rebellion NL image reads STOP FOSSIELE SUBSIDIES

Original article by Peter Geoghegan republished from DeSmog.

Major fossil fuel companies are among Onward’s “corporate partners”.

Onward has had a meteoric rise. Since its inception in 2018, five of its founding advisory board members have taken roles in Conservative cabinets and its reports regularly feature in print and broadcast media.

Onward, which describes itself as “a modernising think tank” with “bold and practical ideas for the centre right”, was ubiquitous at Tory conference in Manchester this week. It hosted two dozen fringe sessions, and it will be out in force at Labour conference in Liverpool this weekend.

While Tufton Street’s free market think tanks refuse to declare their donors, Onward is something of a novelty on Britain’s right-wing think tank scene – twice a year it publishes names of anyone who contributes £5,000 or more (although the value of donations is not declared, nor what the funding is for). 

Fossil fuel giants Shell and BP are members of Onward’s “business network”, where for £12,000 (plus VAT) members get invites to networking opportunities, briefings and previews of reports. 

Onward has been vocal on energy issues. It has called for the Tory government to apply windfall taxes on renewables rather than oil and gas giants and has proposed diversifying “energy supplies through greater use of oil and coal in the short term”.

Last week, another Onward donor, Equnior, received government approval to develop the Rosebank oil field in the North Sea.

Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer said that it’s “a huge concern to see that a think tank with so much influence right at the heart of the government and the opposition is funded by fossil fuel companies”, adding that “we need to get fossil fuel funding out of politics”.

Onward said it does not accept corporate sponsorship of research reports, noting that it published a report last week making the case for government to go further and faster on decarbonisation. 

In all, Onward lists more than 20 “corporate partners”, including Al Altep Holdings Inc, a New York-registered holding company controlled by Len Blavatnik, according to 2021 US filings. Blavatnik made his fortune trading commodities in post-Soviet Russia and topped the Sunday Times Rich List in 2021.

Al Altep Holdings has donated millions of dollars to both Republicans and Democrats in the US, including GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell. Another company owned by Blavatnik previously donated $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee. 

Blavatnik, a dual US-British citizen, is best known in the UK for his sponsorship of the Tate and the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. He has not made political donations in the UK, but he has funded the influential conservative think tank Policy Exchange.

Blavatnik did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Unparalleled Branding Opportunities’

Onward’s disclosures give a rare insight into how a think tank’s funding pool grows. Five years ago, Onward had only a handful of backers, including some charitable foundations and the Tory-linked public affairs firm WPI Strategy.

By 2021, the think tank had more than a dozen corporate partners, including Amazon, energy giant SSE, the National Union of Farmers, and the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

The think tank has also received funding from leading Conservative funders, including mega-donors such as current party treasurer Graham Edwards, former Tory CEO Sir Mick Davis, and IPGL Limited, which is owned by Conservative Foundation board member Lord Michael Spencer.

Onward is well plugged into Tory circles. Conservative MP Neil O’Brien was a co-founder – along with former Theresa May staffer Will Tanner – and the think tank’s current director, former journalist Sebastian Payne, has put himself forward as a Conservative general election candidate.

At Conservative conference, Onward advertised drinks reception sponsorship deals for £30,000 that would give “unparalleled branding opportunities” at an event “for around 200 MPs, special advisers, journalists and industry leaders. It includes a speech from a senior Cabinet minister and remarks from our partner.”

But Onward has been building bridges with Labour, too. Onward’s pre-conference promotional material includes Labour MP Lucy Powell MP saying: “I think Onward are a fantastic think tank”.

At Labour conference, Onward is offering “partnering opportunities” that include funding a private roundtable “led by a senior MP or shadow minister”, priced at £17,500. 

Responding to questions about its funding, an Onward spokesperson said that the think tank “is committed to openness about our funding. 

“We are a not-for-profit organisation and rely entirely on the generosity of our network to support our research programme”.

This article was originally published on Peter Geoghegan’s Substack, Democracy for Sale. [a subscription site]

Original article by Peter Geoghegan republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingInfluential Conservative Think Tank’s Funders Include BP, Shell and Equinor

University of Surrey: Students engage in mass disruption of careers fair over fossil fuel recruitment and arms industry influence

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https://bright-green.org/2023/10/21/university-of-surrey-students-engage-in-mass-disruption-of-careers-fair-over-fossil-fuel-recruitment-and-arms-industry-influence/

Students at the University of Surrey organised a day of mass disruption on their campus on 18 October. Activists from Surrey People & Planet coordinated a series of stunts in protest at the fossil fuel industry engaging in recruitment activities at the university, and over what the group calls the “influence of the arms industry” at the institution. Students dropped multiple banners, put up posters and threw glitter over recruitment stands.

Before the start of the careers fair, a group of students dropped banners on the entrance to the university’s Stag Hill campus, reading ‘BAE systems get the f*ck off our campus’ and ‘warning, killers on our campus’. Several posters were also put up along the access road highlighting what the student group deems the “unethical practices” of firms advertising careers on the campus that day.

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The disruption of the careers fair follows a series of demonstrations organised by students calling for the university to exclude fossil fuel firms from student recruitment activity. In 2022, University of Surrey students’ union agreed to boycott fossil fuel company recruitment.

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https://bright-green.org/2023/10/21/university-of-surrey-students-engage-in-mass-disruption-of-careers-fair-over-fossil-fuel-recruitment-and-arms-industry-influence/

Continue ReadingUniversity of Surrey: Students engage in mass disruption of careers fair over fossil fuel recruitment and arms industry influence

Greenpeace loses legal challenge to UK’s new North Sea oil and gas licences

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Greenpeace image, sign reads CHOOSE OCEANS, NOT OIL
Greenpeace image, sign reads CHOOSE OCEANS, NOT OIL

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/greenpeace-loses-legal-challenge-uks-new-north-sea-oil-gas-licenses-2023-10-19/

LONDON, Oct 19 (Reuters) – Britain’s decision to authorise new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea was lawful, London’s High Court ruled on Thursday, dismissing a legal challenge by Greenpeace.

The environmental campaign group had argued Britain’s failure to assess the greenhouse gases produced by consuming oil and gas – so-called end-use or downstream emissions – rendered its offshore energy plan unlawful.

But lawyers representing Britain’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said at a hearing in July that ministers were not required to assess end-use emissions, though they nonetheless considered them.

Judge David Holgate rejected Greenpeace’s case on Thursday, saying in a written ruling that the decision not to assess end-use emissions was not irrational.

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Greenpeace said it planned to appeal the ruling.

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Continue ReadingGreenpeace loses legal challenge to UK’s new North Sea oil and gas licences

‘Deeply Troubling’ Lack of UK North Sea Oil and Gas Monitoring

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Original article by Andrew Kersley republished from DeSmog.

A North Sea oil rig. Credit: Gary Bembridge / Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Fossil fuel giants are largely left to submit their own extraction and emissions data, a freedom of information request shows.

The main regulator of North Sea oil and gas doesn’t conduct physical inspections to ensure companies operating in the region are following the rules, DeSmog can reveal.

The revelations, labelled “deeply troubling” by campaigners, come as the government and the regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), have announced plans to approve drilling at a new oil field, Rosebank, that could produce 69,000 barrels of oil and 44 million cubic feet of gas a day.

DeSmog filed a freedom of information request (FOI) to the NSTA asking the regulator how it ensured companies stayed within the oil and gas extraction maximums outlined in their licences. These rules govern, among other things, how much oil and gas companies are allowed to extract, and the amount of emissions they can produce in the process.

In its response, the NSTA told DeSmog that a company “must notify” the NSTA if a production limit is breached in the North Sea, but that the NSTA itself “does not undertake offshore inspections to ensure compliance with production consents”.

When asked how, given the lack of inspections, the regulator would ensure that companies are being accurate when they self-report the emissions being produced, the regulator said it hosted “an annual consents exercise” (seemingly a single meeting) during which they remind operators of “their obligations and how to ensure they remain in regulatory compliance”.

The findings suggest that operators in the North Sea are left to largely self-regulate – declaring themselves when they break the legal rules governing their operations.

According to Violation Tracker UK, the NSTA has issued just two fines worth £100,000 since 2021 related to companies exceeding the oil and gas extraction limits in their licence.

“This FOI reveals deeply troubling findings about the lack of proper regulation of North Sea oil and gas extraction,” said Matthew Lawrence, the director of the Common Wealth think tank.

Daniel Jones, a researcher at the campaign and research group Uplift, added that “The NSTA has never acted like a regulator in the normal sense, preferring to steer and encourage the industry into behaving responsibly, rather than mandating that companies reduce their environmental impact.

“It’s only very recently, in 2021, that the NSTA introduced any mechanisms at all to tackle the huge emissions from producing oil and gas, which account for 4 percent of all UK emissions, and even these require companies to do very little”.

‘Light Touch Regulation’

The NSTA, formerly the Oil and Gas Authority, is a private company wholly owned by the government, which primarily seeks to “maximise” the economic output of North Sea oil and gas, and aid the transition to net zero.

This month, the company awarded the UK’s first ever licences for carbon capture and storage (CCS), which it said “could store up to 30 million tonnes of CO2 per year”. However, the role of CCS in the energy transition is hotly contested. 

Climate scientists point to the failure of CCS to remove significant amounts of CO2 emissions, while campaigners warn of the high costs compared to renewable energy. The vast majority of companies also use the captured CO2 to extract more oil through a process called “enhanced oil recovery”.

Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, has compared commissioning CCS sites as well as new oil fields to ordering a truckload of cigarettes for someone giving up smoking.

DeSmog’s new findings also raise concerns about the monitoring of illegal flaring – the burning of excess natural gas produced during the oil and gas drilling process, which produces hundreds of millions of tonnes of CO2 emissions a year.

According to Violation Tracker UK, the NSTA has issued two fines for flaring since 2021, worth a total of £215,000.

In 2022, £65,000 fine was imposed on Equinor, the firm that owns much of the new Rosebank oilfield. Two years prior, Equinor had flared at least 348 tonnes of CO2 over and above the amount it was permitted to burn. Even that failure was considered an “administrative breach” by the NSTA. In the first six months of 2023, the Norwegian-owned energy company posted profits of £17.1 billion.

The UK’s operations in the North Sea produce almost three times the direct greenhouse gases per barrel of oil than our neighbour Norway, largely due to a significantly higher use of flaring on UK-regulated oil rigs. In 2022, UK North Sea operations burned 22 billion cubic feet of gas in offshore flaring.

DeSmog’s findings come just days after the NSTA announced it was approving plans for the Rosebank oilfield, with a government minister claiming the move would lead to “lower emissions” in the UK.

The field has the potential to produce 500 million barrels of oil in its lifetime, which when burned would emit as much carbon dioxide as running 56 coal-fired power stations for a year.

Campaigners including Greta Thunberg have expressed their anger at the proposals, with Green Party MP Caroline Lucas describing the project as “the greatest act of environmental vandalism in my lifetime”.

The government has also said it will imminently issue hundreds of new licences for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, while Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced the watering down of several key net zero targets.

The International Energy Agency warned in May 2021 new fossil fuel developments were incompatible with the effort to limit global temperature increases to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

There are currently 283 active oil and gas fields in the North Sea, and the production process alone generated 13.1 million tonnes of direct CO2 emissions in 2019.

Matthew Lawrence of Common Wealth added that, “Decades of light touch regulation and privatisation have led to an energy system – from North Sea extraction to the super profits being made in energy generation and distribution – geared toward profit maximisation at the expense of people and planet.

“In this context, the government’s decision to approve the Rosebank oilfield and issue 100 new licences for fossil fuel extraction pose an even more grave risk to the climate.

“The alternative is a clean energy system based around meeting public and environmental needs”.

A spokesperson for NSTA did not address any of the findings in the freedom of information request, but stressed that the majority of flares “are fitted with metres” and the group is working to “increase the use of direct measurements”.

They added that government departments receive “actual emission data” on North Sea oil operations and that the NSTA was “working with [the Offshore Petroleum Regulator for Environment and Decommissioning] to improve the visibility of this data and help industry increase the accuracy of emissions measurement”.

Original article by Andrew Kersley republished from DeSmog.

Continue Reading‘Deeply Troubling’ Lack of UK North Sea Oil and Gas Monitoring

Gas Executive ‘Lobbying to Slow Climate Action’ At Labour Party Conference

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Original article by Phoebe Cooke republished from DeSmog.

Tony Ballance from Cadent told the Labour conference to ignore scientific studies that show the limitations of hydrogen for heating.

LIVERPOOL – A senior executive at the UK’s largest gas distributor has been accused of lobbying to slow down climate action after pushing for the use of hydrogen in heating at a Labour Party conference panel on net zero.

Tony Ballance, Cadent’s chief strategy and regulation officer, told a packed event on Monday to ignore a growing body of scientific evidence that finds the fuel to be expensive, resource intensive and inefficient at heating homes.

Emails previously revealed by DeSmog show how the hydrogen lobby is now targeting Labour – which has been hosting its annual conference in Liverpool since Sunday – as the party most likely to win the next general election.

Cadent, the sponsor of the New Statesman event that hosted Ballance, distributes gas to 11 million homes and businesses in the UK. Gas boilers are used to heat around 85 percent of UK homes, which together produce 14 percent of the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions. 

The rapid roll-out of electricity-powered heat pumps to replace gas heating is seen as essential for the UK to reach net zero targets by 2050. Hydrogen, while widely seen as important for decarbonising industrial processes such as steel and concrete manufacture, is not seen by the vast majority of scientists to have a major future role in heating homes.

The gas industry has championed hydrogen as a replacement for gas in heating, arguing that it can easily replace existing methane gas and can use existing pipelines to transport and store the fuel. 

However, a study published this year found heat pumps to be two to three times more efficient than oil and gas based fossil heating systems, even in cold and sub-zero temperatures. It is one of over 40 studies that find hydrogen should only ever play a “limited and complementary role” in heating.

Addressing a question from DeSmog about whether Cadent had taken these studies into account, Ballance claimed that the evidence was “limited”, and encouraged policymakers to consult “more authoritative sources” – such as gas boiler manufacturers.

DeSmog previously revealed that a major gas industry group had paid a PR firm to drum up opposition to heat pumps in the UK press – and promote hydrogen instead. 

In response to Ballance’s claim at the Labour Party conference, Richard Lowes, a heating specialist at the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), accused Cadent of lobbying “to protect their investment and slow down climate action”.

“This is all about lobbying MPs to try and convince them that gas has a future, when the evidence shows it doesn’t,” Lowes told DeSmog.

“The more we learn about using hydrogen for heating, the worse the evidence gets: it is more expensive, extremely inefficient and unsustainable. Together these make it seem very unlikely it will come to anything.”

‘Twee’ Argument

Cadent was one of two gas networks to win a government contract to trial hydrogen for home heating ahead of the government’s decision on the policy, expected in 2026. But plans for the village of Whitby in Cheshire were scrapped in July after a sustained local campaign, which raised concerns over the safety of hydrogen in homes.

In response, then Energy Secretary Grant Shapps indicated that the government was poised to drop plans to replace home gas boilers with hydrogen alternatives.

However, the gas industry is still pushing for a role for hydrogen. Ballance said: “Now as many of you know, there was considerable opposition to the [Whitby] trial… not helped by an anti-hydrogen lobby coming to town, whipping up the anti-hydrogen campaign.”

Despite the considerable and sustained concerns over the safety and environmental impact of hydrogen, Ballance said there “wasn’t opposition” to hydrogen in Whitby – rather, “it was opposition to being forced” into the trial.

In answer to DeSmog’s question about scientific studies showing the inefficiency of hydrogen for heating, Ballance said: “Frankly.. When you scratch the surface.. Frankly it doesn’t pass.”

He said: “You [should] talk to the boiler manufacturers who have the technology and they’re looking at this. You have to scratch below the surface rather than someone just counting up studies and wanting to see things in studies that are actually sometimes misrepresented. It’s about not seeing this [hydrogen versus heat pumps debate] as some kind of twee argument and being really serious about this.”

An investigation by DeSmog found that the Energy and Utilities Alliance (EUA), which represents the vast majority of the UK’s gas boiler manufacturers and distributors – including Cadent – had paid for an extensive negative PR campaign to “spark outrage” against heat pumps in the British press.

Along with other regional gas distributors, Cadent has been advocating for hydrogen via a campaign called Hello Hydrogen, which was launched in October 2022 to “raise awareness of hydrogen gas for heating our homes and calling on the government to commit to a hydrogen future”.

At the event on Monday, Ballance also argued that some of the scientific studies “were in Brazil and California, where it’s not surprising – gas is not going to be the preferred source of heating in much hotter, different countries”.

Richard Lowes told DeSmog that while not all of the studies covered by the academic analysis referred to the UK, many of them do.

“The same outcomes from around the world show that hydrogen will have a limited role in heating and that should reinforce what a terrible idea it is,” he said.

“To my knowledge, no UK study [which is] based on hitting the UK’s net zero climate targets, has ever shown anything more than a marginal role for hydrogen.”

Original article by Phoebe Cooke republished from DeSmog.

Continue ReadingGas Executive ‘Lobbying to Slow Climate Action’ At Labour Party Conference