Oil Firms Growing Amid Global Efforts To Reduce Emissions

Most oil and gas companies worldwide plan to expand their operations despite the risk that this would further intensify global warming, according to a database from German environmental group Urgewald.

The database, which was updated to coincide with the start of the COP31 UN climate talks in Antalya, Turkey, covers around 1,900 companies that produce oil and gas or develop new infrastructure for it.

Urgewald expert Signe Moe said that 96% of oil and gas producers currently want to expand their businesses. This expansion will lead to more emissions of greenhouse gases, worsening the climate crisis and harming people who live nearby, Moe said. 

The environmental organization says Turkey’s state-owned oil company, Türkiye Petrolleri AO (TPAO), is an example of this “fossil ignorance.” 

According to the organization, the company plans to bring almost 2 billion barrels of oil equivalent into production in the coming years. It has also doubled its spending on the search for new oil and gas reserves over the past five years.

Moe said of the expansion plans: “That Turkey is expanding oil and gas development so massively speaks volumes about the credibility of this year’s host of the UN Climate Change Conference.”

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an even welcomed the discovery of two more oil fields in the country’s south-east late Monday, the same day that COP31 opened.

According to the database, oil and gas companies that are wholly or partly state-owned have the most far-reaching expansion plans for the next one to seven years. 

QatarEnergy, for example, plans to bring 27.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent (bboe) into production. They are followed in the ranking by Saudi Aramco (16.8 bboe), Russia’s Gazprom group and Adnoc of the United Arab Emirates.

The roughly 200 states that meet each year for the UN climate conference agreed three years ago in Dubai to gradually move away from fossil fuels.

In 2021, the International Energy Agency calculated that from that year onwards, there should be no more investment in new oil, gas and coal projects if climate neutrality is to be achieved by 2050.