Corporate DispatchPro
Moving on from oil At the height of the Covid-19 emergency, the CEOs of some of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, reiterated their commitment to an emissionsreduction manifesto announced in 2014. The twelve members of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative declared that the pandemic would not deter their efforts towards accelerated transitions to lower carbon energy. The public statement was not a cloud of hot words in a climate of global turbulence: the risks to fossil-centric energy production have been evident to the industry for the last decade, at least. The CEO of the world’s biggest asset manager, BlackRock, advised clients in 2020 that the corporation would make sustainability a central consideration in investing, keeping an eye on oil and gas companies. The investor community has a crucial role to play in the speed and intensity with which the industry shifts from hydrocarbons. That said, more than half of global oil and gas production is controlled by national governments, not companies. In this scenario, efforts by investors need to be matched with policies. The EU Commission, for example, set out strict goals to reach netzero emissions across the Single Market economy by 2050. While the European Green Deal was officially launched in 2019, the EU Parliament had been pushing in its direction for years. European oil majors, in fact, responded with their own decarbonisation strategies. Shell has committed to cut 30 percent of its carbon footprint by 2035; Total plans to place a fifth of its capital investments in clean energy projects over the next decade; Repsol expects a net-zero output by 2050. 21
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