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occidental petroleum
Red Sea Oil Spill Averted, No Thanks to the Fossil Fuel Industry
Transnational polluters like TotalEnergies, Exxon, OMV, and Occidental should be paying the estimated $140 million cost of the FSO SAFER salvage operation.
Aug 15, 2023
After more than eight years of relentless effort and numerous hurdles, the U.N.-led hazardous operation to remove more than a million barrels of oil from the decaying FSO SAFER supertanker off Yemen’s coast and scrap the ageing vessel has taken a major step towards a safe conclusion.
This momentous achievement means the almost decade-long saga is in the home stretch, highlighting the power of collective action, but also exposing the heartless indifference of the oil industry to the consequences of its actions.
Crisis Averted
The FSO SAFER, once a looming threat on the horizon of the Red Sea, is now rid of its perilous cargo. This success stands as a testament to international cooperation, determination, and the unwavering commitment of organizations like Greenpeace, Holm Akhdar, and other allies who played a pivotal role in galvanizing global awareness about the impending dangers posed by the deteriorating supertanker.
Years of tireless advocacy and collaboration have culminated in the commencement and successful completion of the operation. The fact that the operation was necessary in the first place underscores not only the remarkable feat of averting disaster but also serves as a stark reminder that too often, communities and governments are left to clean up the mess created by the oil industry.
The potential consequences of an oil spill in the Red Sea cannot be overstated. It could inflict irreparable damage on coastal communities, fragile ecosystems, and marine life, exacerbating both the ongoing humanitarian crisis and the impacts of the climate crisis in the region.
Make Polluters Pay
As we commemorate this significant milestone, it is crucial to confront a disheartening reality: The very oil companies behind this perilous situation have demonstrated a glaring lack of responsibility. Despite reaping record profits, these major polluters have abdicated their obligation to address the potential risks and consequences posed by the FSO SAFER.
Oil giants such as TotalEnergies, Exxon, OMV, and Occidental, beneficiaries of the SAFER’s operations, have not taken meaningful action to forestall a potential oil spill catastrophe in the Red Sea. These transnational polluters should be paying the estimated $140 million cost of the salvage operation. Instead, U.N. members, the private sector, and individuals from all over the world have contributed $121 million, with another estimated $22 million still needed.
This underscores the urgent necessity for heightened accountability within the oil industry, laying bare the stark disparity between financial gains and ethical responsibility.
Shipbreaking: Do No Harm
Even as we celebrate the successful resolution of the immediate FSO SAFER crisis, it is crucial to acknowledge that the journey is far from over. The legacy of neglect and disregard for environmental consequences demands a transformative shift in the oil industry’s practices. Oil companies that have used this vessel to shovel money into their coffers should pay for its scrapping in environmentally sustainable ways that safeguard against potential harm its disposal could inflict on other communities.
We agree with the NGO Shipbreaking Platform call for the vessel to be recycled in a yard that complies with the E.U.-Ship Recycling Regulations. Such facilities are also found in non-E.U. countries. The concern lies in the possibility of the U.N. opting for cheaper options to scrap the ship, driven by insufficient funding. This scenario could lead to the SAFER winding up on one of the ship scrapping shores in South Asia dismantled under rudimentary conditions, with harmful consequences for the host country and its people.
It would be a tragedy to have averted one disaster in the Red Sea only to have another impacting people elsewhere.
Yemen Oil Risk Not Over
It’s also vital to emphasize that storing the oil in a new vessel cannot be a final solution. Although the YEMEN tanker is in notably better condition than the SAFER, the crisis can only be fully mitigated by safely and completely removing the oil from Yemeni waters.
Demand Climate Justice
The salvage operation serves as a poignant reminder of the pressing need to liberate ourselves from the shackles of fossil fuels. The long-running FSO SAFER saga underscores the imperative for the oil industry to reckon with its complicity in the climate and nature crisis and to take decisive measures to rectify the damage it has caused.
Success in averting a catastrophic oil spill in the Red Sea offers a moment of reflection and inspiration, reiterating the urgent demand for accountability, sustainability, and climate justice in our relentless pursuit to safeguard our planet and the generations that will inherit it.
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Beware ADNOC’s Greenwashing Ahead of COP28
CCS should not be used as a smokescreen for real climate action or as an excuse to carry on drilling. We must transition away from oil and gas.
Aug 04, 2023
At the beginning of 2000s, as concerns about climate change grew, some of the biggest oil companies began to modify their climate change public relations strategies.
Instead of denying the evidence to sow doubt, they decided to try and spin their actions in more of a positive light. To try and co-opt the debate. They learnt their strategy from the masters of deception, the tobacco industry.
BP was the first to break ranks by changing its old tired logo to a Helios, a Greek sunburst, with its new strapline “beyond petroleum.”
The concept of a fossil fuel company registering a website that mirrors the temperature rise the world is trying to limit itself to because of burning fossil fuels would be seen as deeply ironic by many. But not the deeply misguided leaders at Occidental.
BP never did go beyond petroleum, but the company had thrown a gauntlet down to the others to give the smokescreen of at least beginning to take climate change seriously.
By now, there was emerging scientific consensus that the world had to limit warming to 1.5°C if we wanted a liveable future. So four years later, in 2004, Occidental Petroleum quietly registered the website: www.1pointfive.com.
The concept of a fossil fuel company registering a website that mirrors the temperature rise the world is trying to limit itself to because of burning fossil fuels would be seen as deeply ironic by many. But not the deeply misguided leaders at Occidental.
As the oil industry expanded its production and still tried to obfuscate action on climate change, the 1pointfive.com website lay dormant for 16 long years. And every year, our climate emergency has worsened.
Finally, in 2020, the website sprung into life. In October of that year, the website was launched, outlining in bold: “A Turning Point for Climate Change.” The website said the mission of the company was “Negative emissions.”.
It stated: “Oxy Low Carbon Ventures and Rusheen Capital have come together to drive change and jumpstart the Direct Air Capture industry around the world.”
Fast forward another three years, and this week, Occidental announced that it had signed an agreement with ADNOC, the Abu Dhabi National Oil company, to evaluate investment opportunities in the controversial technologies of Carbon, Capture, and Storage (CCS), in both the UAE and the U.S..
ADNOC is in the spotlight this year because its head, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, is the host of COP28 climate talks, a choice which has drawn criticism from climate activists and scientists alike. Christiana Figueres, ex-Secretary General of the UNFCC, calls the idea of putting Al Jaber in charge of COP as “dangerous.”
She is not the only one outraged that the head of an oil company should host the world’s leading climate conference. It is akin to a tobacco executive hosting a conference on lung cancer and health.
You cannot be an oil company boss and host a climate conference without escaping controversy and scrutiny. So ADNOC is desperate to boost its green credentials, or at least give its operations a good green veneer, just as BP tried to do earlier this century.
To this end, the announcement between Occidental and ADNOC noted that two oil companies had come together “to develop a carbon management platform to accelerate the net-zero goals of both companies.” The key to this plan is Direct Air Capture—sucking carbon dioxide out of the air and burying it underground.
Recent OCI research has shown that the UAE is poised to become the third-largest expander of oil and gas production between 2023 and 2025, and ADNOC the second-largest expander company.
Despite the spin, even the company’s website shows how futile this procedure is. According to the 1pointfive website, globally it takes 13 hours to emit 67 million tonnes of CO2, enough to fill the Hoover Dam.
In contrast, it states that 1PointFive is developing the world’s largest Direct Air Capture facility, which will suck out 500,000 tonnes per year. That is 0.75% of what the world emits in 13 hours captured in one year.
And even if the Direct Air Capture technology is a success, there are other problems too.
Again trying to ward off its critics, ADNOC has just produced its first-ever report documenting the scale of its carbon emissions. The company says it emitted about 24 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2022. So direct air capture would again only capture 2% of this.
But more importantly, the 24 million tonne figure is still not including its Scope 3 emissions. These are the emissions from burning oil and gas, which usually equate for 80-90% of an oil or gas company’s emissions.
The Occidental and ADNOC announcement on carbon capture came a day after ADNOC revised its plans to reach net-zero emissions by 2045 from an original target of 2050. ADNOC also stated that it aimed to achieve zero methane emissions by the end of the decade.
On the surface, this seems welcome, but in reality, it is just more smoke and mirrors.
The announcements form part of a wider climate spin machine that includes fake bots spreading misinformation on Twitter and a potential rebrand.
Last month, leaked documents obtained by the Centre for Climate Reporting and Drilled revealed that ADNOC worried about “whats in a name” and had become “increasingly aware of the reputational challenges posed by our brand name.” ADNOC was thinking of future-proofing “the company, without compromising or undermining the equity of the ADNOC brand.”
Due to this, the UAE had contemplated dropping the word oil from ADNOC’s name in a major rebranding—or greenwashing—exercise. Just as BP had changed its name, so ADNOC was thinking of doing the same.
An advertising pitch warned that the ‘National Oil Company’ portion of its name was a “target for potential criticism.” Therefore the rebranded, green-veneered ADNOC would position itself as “a disruptive, ambitious, and confident energy company of the future” that “will invest and operate across the energy spectrum—from hydrocarbons and hydrogen to new and emerging energies.”
The rebrand may not have happened, but there are other flaws too. Firstly, despite this new commitment to reach net zero quicker and to develop its carbon capture technology, ADNOC still plans to increase production.
The reality is, as The Wall Street Journal so neatly put it in a recent headline: “Occidental Plans to Suck Carbon From the Air—So It Can Keep Pumping Oil.”
CCS should not be used as a smokescreen for real climate action or as an excuse to carry on drilling. We must transition away from oil and gas.
Recent OCI research has shown that the UAE is poised to become the third-largest expander of oil and gas production between 2023 and 2025, and ADNOC the second-largest expander company.
The analysis shows that ADNOC’s new oil and gas production over the next three years would lock in over 2.7 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions, equivalent to one year of the European Union’s CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.
Anything short of phasing out fossil fuel expansion and production will lead to climate chaos.
Secondly, as the WSJ points out, we have no idea if direct air capture will work at scale. “Removing CO2 from the atmosphere at this scale has never been done before, and the enterprise comes with abundant commercial and scientific uncertainties... Many industry experts doubt that direct-air capture can be done economically because the amounts of air that need to be scrubbed are so large.”
Also, the company is not doing this to save the climate but to make money off the flawed carbon markets. 1pointfive.com is working with Verra, the industry leader in carbon offsetting. An investigation by The Guardianand Source Material earlier this year found that more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets issued by Verra were worthless. It’s no wonder commentators are skeptical:
Both announcements are part of a public relations drive by ADNOC in the run-up to COP. Again spin over substance.
David Tong, the Global Industry Campaign Manager for OCI who spoke toLiving on Earth this week, said that ADNOC was “on track to be the second largest expander in terms of companies with the most expansion in new oil and gas from this year until 2025. So it’s really concerning to have him presiding over the U.N.’s crucial climate change negotiations.”
Moving the net zero target by five years, says Tong, looks “like a presidency, a country under intense pressure given their extraordinary conflict of interest, that is trying to salvage their credibility by framing themselves as a climate leader, without actually taking meaningful action to achieve this.”
“The UAE has made it very clear that they see it necessary to phase out fossil fuel emissions and argue that that is somehow possible to do without phasing out fossil fuels. That is simply false.”
The domestic policies that the UAE is putting in place have not changed significantly with this new target, and they are grossly insignificant, said Tong. “They’re all in on expanding the use of fossil gas, which is completely at odds with both their climate targets and with what the world needs for 1.5°C.”
“The UAE has made it very clear that they see it necessary to phase out fossil fuel emissions and argue that that is somehow possible to do without phasing out fossil fuels. That is simply false,” says Tong. “And the UAE is planning to do this through claiming that they can use dangerous distractions like carbon capture, which is a smokescreen to allow for continued oil and gas production.”
Finally, Tong said, “Both the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency have made it clear that there’s no room for new oil and gas if we are to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement and limit warming to 1.5.”
If we are to keep 1.5 alive, we cannot carry on drilling for oil and gas, like ADNOC is. We cannot allow oil companies to set up climate-friendly-sounding websites pushing false and flawed solutions like Occidental has. We have to start phasing out production, which ADNOC is not.
It should also be pointed out that wealthy countries such as Norway, the U.K., Canada, Australia, and the USA have not signalled that they will cut production either. They must act too. But that does not let ADNOC off the hook. No matter how much spin you read or see in the run-up to COP28, ADNOC is not a climate leader until it signals it really is going beyond petroleum and keeping oil in the ground.
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