LONDON, (Reuters) – BP set one of the oil sector’s most ambitious targets for curbing carbon emissions yesterday as new chief executive Bernard Looney began the biggest revamp in its 111-year history.
While investor groups welcomed the 2050 targets set out by Looney, which put BP ahead of rivals Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Equinor and all of the U.S. oil majors, environmental campaigners criticised a lack of detail.
“We have got to change and change profoundly because the world is changing fast and so are society’s expectations of us,” Looney said in his first major speech as CEO, after earlier highlighting a need to “reinvent BP”.
“It is aiming to reduce and neutralise the carbon in the oil and gas that we dig out of the ground,” Looney added.
BP did not say how it intends to get emissions from its operations and barrels produced to net zero and halve the intensity of emissions by all products it sells, including diesel and petrol, a measure known as Scope 3.
The company has tried, and failed, to reinvent itself before, with a pioneering plan to build a large renewables business in the early 2000s which ended with huge losses.
One possible way to hit greenhouse gas reduction targets is to buy offset certificates and bet on carbon capture and storage technology, which is not yet used on a commercial scale.
But Charlie Kronick, Oil Advisor from Greenpeace UK, was sceptical about how BP can deliver.
“How will they reach net zero … When will they stop wasting billions on drilling for new oil and gas we can’t burn?”
Shares in BP were up 1.3% at 1423 GMT, roughly in line with the broader European energy sector index after the news, which confirmed a Reuters report in January.
