Has TotalEnergies minimized its carbon footprint? Yes according to Greenpeace
which publishes this Wednesday a report in collaboration with the cabinet X-Factor.
The NGO has recalculated the French oil and gas group’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2019 and claims that there is a “abyssal gap” between its results and the official declarations of the multinational. According to Greenpeace, TotalEnergies issued four times more GHGs than declared. The association, which sued the company for deceptive marketing practices in March accusing it of “greenwashing”, says it has “sent a report to the Financial Markets Authority”.
“Lack of transparency”
Total, which complies with the legal obligation to publish its carbon footprint every year, i.e. the figures for its greenhouse gas emissions on a global scale, indicated “having emitted 455 million tonnes in 2019”. But Greenpeace’s estimate is “nearly four times higher than that communicated by the major, i.e. a total issue of 1.6 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent”.
A result that “underlines the obvious lack of transparency of TotalEnergies”, estimates the environmental protection association. “Her responsibility for the climate crisis is far greater than she cares to acknowledge.” according to François Chartier, ocean and oil campaign manager at Greenpeace, who judges the group’s stated ambitions to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 “downright whimsical”.
Unreliable criteria
The NGO argues that the “international criteria and standards” used to calculate GHG volumes have been defined by the oil and gas industry herself. Greenpeace also questions the “reporting methodology” of TotalEnergies which it considers insufficiently detailed.
“The group’s GHG emissions reporting shows, beyond a permanent lack of transparency, at least a lack of seriousness in the treatment of climate figures“, laments the association which points to the gap with the balance sheet of the British Shell, 3.6 times higher than TotalEnergies while its oil and gas production is only 1.22 times higher and its oil sales 1.6 times more important.
Methodologies discussed
While carbon footprint methodologies are complex and controversial, Greenpeace claims that its quantification, “without claiming an ‘absolute truth'”is a “contribution to the debate”.
The data put forward by the NGO are “whimsical” replied TotalEnergies in a press release. “The Greenpeace report follows a dubious methodology”believes the company, which points out that the study recognizes “several times the emissions linked to the combustion of products”.
The GHG Protocol, the most widely used global standard for establishing these assessments, but interpreted differently, distinguishes three types of emissions: direct emissions from activity (known as “scope 1”), emissions linked to electricity consumption, heat and steam (“scope 2”), and indirect emissions upstream and downstream of production (“scope 3”).
This “scope 3”, which includes the gasoline consumed by motorists or the gas burned by the cooker, represents the bulk of emissions from the fossil fuel sector. For TotalEnergies, Factor-X estimates this scope at 1.4 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent (90% of the total carbon footprint) in 2019 compared to 410 million in the group’s figures. “The emissions calculated by Greenpeace would correspond to more than 4% of global emissions” related to this industry in the International Energy Agency’s count (36 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent) in 2019, without equivalence with “the market share of TotalEnergies in the sector”, “between 1 and 2%”, emphasizes the group.
Greenpeace has chosen to base itself on the public data of ADEME emission factors.
It took 2019 as the reference year, i.e. before the Covid-19 health crisis. The NGO has decided to focus only on scopes 1 and 3, like TotalEnergies in its official statements. “We have not recalculated and do not include so-called scope 2 emissions, which are not specific to oil and gas activities”, justifies Greenpeace.
Scope 1 includes greenhouse gas emissions directly linked to the manufacture of the product. Scope 3 is broader, it includes in particular emissions related to the company’s suppliers, employee travel or the purchase of raw materials.