Few Details On Just How BP Will Erase Its California-Sized Carbon Output; Oh, And One Huge Loophole
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Other European oil companies — including Royal Dutch Shell, Total and Equinor — have already adopted targets to curb their emissions. But BP is going further, pledging to also zero out the emissions associated with the oil and gas it pumps out of the ground and sells.
That last step is both the hardest and most significant, since it is where oil companies have an outsize climate impact. BP said that the company emits about 55 million tons of greenhouse gases each year directly from its extraction operations and refineries. But an additional 360 million tons each year are emitted when the oil and gas that BP extracts is sold and eventually burned to fuel vehicles or heat homes. To put that in context, the entire state of California produced 424 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2017.
To shrink the emissions that come from the use of its products, BP may have to reduce the amount of oil and gas that it extracts, develop lower-carbon fuels such as those made from algae or plants, or offset its fuel emissions through steps like planting trees or investing in still-nascent technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air. Mr. Looney said in a statement that BP would begin laying out a more detailed strategy in September.
The announcement came with a caveat: BP isn’t currently planning to zero out emissions from oil and gas extracted by other companies and then processed by BP and resold. The burning of those fuels creates an additional 77 million tons or so of emissions each year, the company said. Instead, BP will aim to cut the carbon intensity — the amount of emissions per unit of energy — from these products in half by 2050.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/12/climate/bp-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html