Increased oil presence | The duty

It is not easy to get the oil out of the oil companies. Even less oil companies.

A text from Agence France-Presse (AFP) published on June 14 indicated that Shell had changed course to now aim for “stable” oil production until 2030, after having unveiled in 2021 reduction targets from 1 to 2 % per year.

The energy shock is a good pretext for fossil fuel companies. At least, clearly, the war in Ukraine has brought security of energy supply to the forefront of the climate emergency for many governments and companies in the sector, can we read.

Explaining its decision, the oil giant pointed out that “the pace of the transition from fossil fuels to low-carbon energies depends on many things, including government policies, the cost of energy development and consumer demand”.

‘Like other fossil fuel giants which have also scaled back their ambitions, Shell now admits it has no plans to change its business model, which is incompatible with efforts’ against ‘climate collapse’ “, lamented the NGO Friends of the Earth.

In the same breath, it was recalled that the other British “major”, BP, had also announced in February, on the sidelines of record results, that it intended to boost its profits by 2030 by investing more both in renewable energies, but also in hydrocarbons, slowing the pace of its energy transition.

Overall, the reluctance of companies in their commitments, but especially in action in the face of climate change, is already well documented. The day before, AFP echoed Net Zero Tracker’s observations that barely half of large companies have promised to erase their carbon footprint in the coming decades, but that a handful of them have credible plans to do so. to arrive at.

On the list of the 2000 largest companies in the world compiled by Forbes Global 2000, 929 companies have set such objectives. promises of carbon neutrality do not meet the minimum qualitative criteria for this neutrality,” said John Lang, co-author of the report, interviewed by AFP.

In particular, only 4% of company pledges meet the five basic criteria formulated in the UN’s global Zero Zero campaign requiring that carbon neutrality objectives cover all greenhouse gases (including methane ) across the entire value chain of scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. On this last point, barely a third of the commitments of the companies examined included scope 3 emissions, which implies including indirect emissions, upstream and downstream of the company’s value chain.

In the fossil fuel sector, 75 of the 112 largest groups in the sector have set themselves carbon neutrality targets, up 50% over one year. But most do not include “range 3”, which “renders them largely insignificant”, according to comments from Net Zero Tracker, taken up by AFP.

Meanwhile in Canada

Canada is far from standing out. The 2023 release of the 10-year oil sands outlook from analyst firm S&P Global Commodity Insights includes the first upward revision to its oil sands growth forecast in more than half a decade, it notes. . Canadian oil sands production is expected to reach 3.7 million barrels per day by 2030, half a million barrels per day more than today, and an increase of 140,000 in 2030 over forecasts of last year.

“Capital spending in 2022 is at its highest level since 2015 and could increase further in 2023,” she said, with most of the outlook for production growth coming from optimization. “Exit optimizations are a relatively new phenomenon and include, as the name suggests, exiting existing operational areas to new, high-quality adjacent land,” she explains.

In fact, Oxford Economics predicted in March that non-residential capital spending would increase by 4.3% this year, or 5.2% in the private sector and 2.7% in the public sector. Thus, 14 of the 20 sub-sectors scrutinized by Oxford say they want to increase their capital expenditure this year. But the bulk of the intentions comes from mining, oil and gas, with an expected increase of 13.7%, which would add to the 24.3% seen in 2022 and which would account for about half of the increase. total increase expected this year in the private sector.

For its part, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers predicts an 11% increase in investment in oil and gas production this year, to 40 billion, or 28.5 billion in oil and natural gas.
conventional and $11.5 billion in oil sands.

According to the specialized firm S&P Global, Canada should continue to put on new production and export records, before a “very slight decline” begins to appear… at the beginning of the 2030s.

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