Oil Majors Notch Record Profits, Spend 100X More On Conventional Than Renewable, Claim "Green"

[hatrack]

The chief financial officer of the oil and gas company BP, Murray Auchincloss, told investors this week: “It’s possible that we’re getting more cash than we know what to do with.” Oil and gas companies have reported bumper profits, as the gas crisis raises the price at which they can sell their fossil fuels, without raising the cost of their extraction.

While they are being showered with cash, households in the UK are suffering the biggest fall in income in three decades, with one in 10 households not having enough money for food and food bank use soaring. This week, BP reported a profit of $12.8bn (£9.4bn) for last year, following Shell’s announcement last week of $19.3bn in profits. Little of the money is going to taxpayers: Channel 4 revealed that BP has paid no tax on its North Sea oil and gas for five years.

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Chris Venables, of the Green Alliance thinktank, said: “The time for oil and gas companies to have invested in the clean energy transition was two decades ago – when they were peddling climate change denialism. If they were serious about renewable energy, they would be doing it right now, but instead their investments are largely going to new oil and gas. So this is a disingenuous argument.” Investment in clean energy by oil and gas companies was about 1% of their capital expenditure in 2020, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a proportion likely to have reached little more than 4% for the whole of last year. Meanwhile, the companies are continuing to invest vast sums in exploration and new fields, which the IEA said last year could not be brought to fruition if the world was to limit global heating to 1.5C.

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Richard Black, a senior associate at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, said: “The key point about oil and gas majors arguing that higher profits are needed to invest in greening their operations is: prove it. If they argue that is why high profits are justified, they should pledge publicly that a sizable proportion will be invested in proven technologies like wind, solar and storage, rather than blue hydrogen or carbon capture and storage, which are either of unproven potential or several years off.” He was sceptical of whether oil and gas companies would do so. “Past experience suggests that the oil and gas industry is strong on rhetoric when it comes to cleaning up their act, but investment is still inadequate. If they were to make these commitments, with a timeframe for spending, and set up an independent panel of arbiters to verify their commitments, then maybe it would have some credibility.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/11/more-cash-than-we-know-what-to-do-with-oil-and-gas-companies-report-bumper-profits

[CrispyQ]

1. "It's possible that we're getting more cash than we know what to do with."

That should be the thread title.

snip...

BP plans to invest about £2bn-£3bn in renewable energy by 2025, but its overall capital investment will be £60bn, most of which is likely to go into new production that will raise greenhouse gas emissions. The company is estimated to have spent about $3.2bn on clean energy since 2016, and $84bn on oil and as exploration and development over the same period.

I read some nations are calling natural gas & nuclear energy "green." (The EU, IIRC.)

We're fucked.

[Midnight Writer]

2. I watch these corporate CEOs on business news and it is sickening to hear them.

I understand that business schools teach that corporations have no responsibility other then returning maximum profits to investors.

They don't give a damn about their customers, their employees, or the public. And they are certainly not patriots or moral people, though they all claim to be.

[NNadir]

3. One should consider the fact that investments in so called "renewable energy" is responsible...

...for the spike in the prices of dangerous fossil fuels, since so called "renewable energy" has been ineffective at providing energy.

There is a reason Germany's been burning lignite all winter. Anyone refusing to see that reason is simply in denial.