UAE oil giant pledges to ‘accelerate’ zero-carbon plan

AFP | Dubai                              

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

The national oil giant of the United Arab Emirates, host of this year’s UN climate talks, said yesterday it had accelerated its emission reduction goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company “is accelerating its decarbonisation plan to advance its net-zero ambition to 2045, compared to its previous target of 2050,” ADNOC said in a statement.

It said it intends to “increase its investments and redouble efforts in decarbonisation,” relying on an initial financing of $15 billion for “low-carbon solutions” and achieving “zero methane emissions by 2030”.

Environmental groups charge that net-zero pledges from the world’s energy giants are misleading when the companies in fact plan to increase their oil and gas sales, as ADNOC does.

The pledges to cut emissions apply to producing, refining and processing operations -– not to the vastly greater emissions caused when the fuel is burnt to power cars, planes and factories. The oil giant said it has “reduced its greenhouse gas emissions” by about five million tons in 2022, mostly through the use of solar and nuclear energy, to power all of its onshore operations.

The UAE, one of the world’s leading oil exporters, is set to host the COP28 climate summit in November and December. Its new plans set this month to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 19 percent by 2030 compared to 2019 levels were criticised by analysts as “insufficient”.

Climate Action Tracker, a project run by non-profit climate groups, said that while this marked an improvement on the UAE’s previous plan, its intention to increase fossil fuel production would render it “unachievable”.

ADNOC CEO Sultan Al Jaber, who will head up the UN climate talks, has argued that fossil fuels will to continue to play a key role, and that carbon capture technologies will play contain emissions. The world remains far off track on the Paris Agreement’s goals to curb global warming to two degrees Celsius, and preferably 1.5C.