Big Oil Spent 1 Percent on Green Energy in 2018

by Ron Bousso (Reuters) Top oil and gas companies jointly spent around 1 percent of their 2018 budgets on clean energy, but investments by Europe’s giants vastly outpaced their U.S. and Asian rivals, a study showed.

Shell leads the pack with future plans to spend $1-2 billion per year on clean energy technologies out of a total budget of $25 to $30 billion. Norway’s Equinor plans to spend 15-20 percent of its budget on renewables by 2030.

Since 2010, Total has spent the most on low-carbon energies, around 4.3 percent of its budget, according to the study.

As a whole, however, the world’s top 24 publicly-listed companies spent 1.3 percent of total budgets of $260 billion on low carbon energy in 2018.

That is still nearly double the 0.68 percent of investments the group had made in the period between 2010 and 2017.

Since 2016, 148 deals have been made in alternative energy and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technologies.

Energy companies are increasingly shifting towards producing gas, the least polluting fossil fuel that they say will play a major role in reducing emissions by displacing dirtier coal and meeting rising demand for electricity.

The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), which brings together 13 of the world’s top oil and gas companies, pledged earlier this year to slash emissions of a potent greenhouse gas by a fifth by 2025. READ MORE