The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), which is comprised of 13 publicly traded major and national oil companies, launched a new program to unlock large-scale investments in carbon capture, use, and storage (CCUS) on Sept. 23.
OGCI’s CCUS kick-starter campaign is designed to help decarbonize multiple industrial hubs around the world, starting with hubs in the US, UK, Norway, Netherlands, and China, the group said as it prepared to begin its annual meeting in New York City.
It noted that the campaign’s aim is to create the necessary conditions to facilitate a commercially viable, safe, and environmentally responsible CCUS industry, with an early aspiration to double the amount of carbon dioxide that is currently stored globally before 2030.
To achieve this, OGCI said it would start by building on the work of many others to jointly put five emerging hubs into operation in the five countries. It indicated that it intends to double the amount of CO2 that is currently stored globally, while building a pipeline of potential future hubs to bring this new industry to scale.
OGCI said it also has launched a joint CCUS Acceleration Framework with the 11 countries supporting the Clean Energy Ministerial CCUS Initiative, which brings governments and industries together to create a global, commercial CCUS industry at the scale needed to meet the Paris Climate Agreement (PCA).
Methane reduction progress
The group also reported progress in meeting the methane intensity target that it announced last year (OGJ Online, Sept. 24, 2018). Members are on track to meet that target, having reduced collective methane intensity by 9% in 2018, it said. “We are on track to reach our methane intensity target of 0.25% by 2025,” the group said. OGCI now is working on a carbon intensity target to reduce by 2025 the collective average carbon intensity of member companies’ aggregated upstream oil and gas operations, it added.
“Third, all OGCI member companies have pledged to support policies that attribute an explicit or implicit value to carbon,” the group said. “Acknowledging the role that attributing a value to carbon plays as one of the most cost-efficient ways to achieve the low carbon transition as early as possible, OGCI supports the introduction of appropriate policies or carbon value mechanisms by governments.”
OGCI Climate Investments, the group’s $1-billion fund, has nearly doubled the number of investments in promising clean technologies over the year, OGCI reported. The fund now has 15 investments in its portfolio that actively support companies in deployment and scale-up as well as continuing to search for additional opportunities.
Chevron Corp., Chinese National Petroleum Corp., Eni SPA, Equinor ASA, ExxonMobil Corp., Occidental Petroleum Corp., Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Repsol YPF SA, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, and Total SA are OGCI’s 11 publicly traded members. Two others, Saudi Aramco and Chinese National Petroleum Corp., are NOCs.
“We are scaling up the speed, scale, and impact of our actions in support of the [2016] [PCA],” OGCI said. “The progress toward our methane intensity target makes us confident that the actions we are taking deliver results. Encouraged by our experience of working together on reducing methane emissions, we are working on a target now to reduce by 2025 the collective average carbon intensity of our aggregated upstream oil and gas emissions.”