Fossil fuel industry’s claims about taking care of our growing clean electricity demand falls short, but boy, the industry is over-achieving in their production of GHG

 

Big Oil’s clean energy commitments are overpromising and underdelivering, and wildly so. Too many people still believe these fossil fuel corporations because they promote their investments in renewables, as seen on TV, as it were (and in magazine ads, speeches by their C-level executives and friendly politicians, in mass media articles and programs, “advertorials,” and so many channels, ad nauseum). What these corporations actually do is continue to spend their capital toward fossil fuel extraction and expansion.

If you are surprised by this, I’d like to introduce you to Bigfoot.

The Rundown on “Non-Greening” Fossil Fuel Corporations

Evidence of under-delivery on “clean investments” by the fossil fuel corporations is readily available. For instance, The International Energy Agency (IEA) found that in 2022, the oil and gas industry invested around $20 billion in clean energy, or only 2.5% of total capital spending. Fast-forward two years, and a 2024 report indicates that annual upstream capital expenditures in oil and gas surpassed $600 billion for the first time in a decade, while dropping the percentage of capital spending on clean energy to around a third of one percent.

Want to guess if this miniscule clean energy capital investment has gone up in 2025? Considering the Trump Administration’s death-dealing opposition to clean energy, and the role Trump’s EPA plays in killing and weakening many environmental regulations, my bet is that when 2025 comes to a close, the percentage of capital spent by Big Oil on clean energy investment will be even smaller than in 2024.

In recent years, several major oil companies have walked back or weakened their climate goals, and when I write “several major oil companies,” I mean pretty much each and every one. BP reduced its 2030 emissions reduction target from 35–40% to 20–30%. Shell weakened its 2030 target from 20% to 15–20% and completely scrapped its 2035 target and now has shifted its strategy to “refocus on its core oil and gas business.” Equinor has halved its spending on renewables and boosted its oil and gas production outlook with the new goal to increase production by 10%, while reducing its 2030 target for renewable capacity from 12-16 GW to 10-12 GW. TotalEnergies, the major French energy corporation, is reducing its low-carbon energy projects, too, and I haven’t even mentioned Chevron or Exxon, but the list of Big Oil backtracking on clean energy capital investment targets goes on and on.

But wait, isn’t Equinor involved in wind power generation projects? Yes, Empire Wind, which is in the U.S., and is set to become the first offshore energy development to provide power to New York City. The first phase is under construction and will power over 500,000 homes.

Here is where this stands, according to Google AI Overview:

Empire Wind is under construction, but has experienced setbacks, including a “stop work” order issued in April 2025 by the Trump administration, which was lifted in May 2025, allowing construction to resume. The Empire Wind 1 project is progressing with onshore work at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal and will begin offshore construction in 2025, with first power delivery expected in late 2026 and full operation by the end of 2027. Empire Wind 2’s power purchase agreement was terminated, but Equinor is re-evaluating the project for future solicitations.

The consensus view of how the stop work got lifted is that NY Governor Kathy Hochul dropped the state’s opposition to a major natural gas pipeline project being pushed by the Trump Administration. Don’t get me wrong: Equinor is a hero relative to its Big Oil brothers, and the wind farm, Empire Wind is a good thing. The second part, Empire 2, however, is currently dead, or is that limbo?

There is also Equinor’s Hywind Tampen project, “the world’s largest floating wind farm, located off the coast of Norway,” which is operational already. But what is the point of Hywind Tampen? The answer: Provide power to offshore oil and gas installations, offsetting carbon dioxide emissions. Hear that? Equinor is reducing carbon dioxide emissions as they produce oil and gas. Yay!

Words, Lies, and Misdirection

The problem with lies is that people might believe them, and this holds true with what Big Oil says, which is why one really needs to look at what Big Oil does. Recently, a climate activist colleague sent round an email to raise the spirits of the gang, and the message was a search result for “Who is someone who is head of oil company who is transitioning to renewables.” The search results listed five fossil fuel corporation CEOs, along with brief explanations about how each was pursuing clean energy in some way in the corporations they led. Here’s one example, followed by my comment back to the email list:

Claudio Descalzi (Eni): Eni, an Italian multinational energy company, has been led by Claudio Descalzi for a decade, with a focus on both traditional energy and a move towards decarbonized energy products. Eni is actively replacing coal with gas in the power sector and investing in R&D for “clean” fossil fuels and “continuous” renewables. Descalzi also co-founded the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, aimed at addressing climate change within the industry.

I wrote back:

Here’s a telltale: “Eni is actively replacing coal with gas in the power sector and investing in R&D for ‘clean’ fossil fuels.” There is literally no such thing as a clean fossil fuel. The idea that gas is a transition fuel for the renewable energy transition is b.s. Replacing coal sounds good, but coal is already too expensive to make sense to keep, but natural gas—largely methane–has an equally high GHG emissions value as coal according to some research, and mainly because the production of natural gas all along its production and distribution chain is rife with leakage of methane, a GHG 80 times more potent than CO2.

I broke down Google’s cavalier claims one by one. The other companies on the list were Chevron, Shell, Equinor, and TotalEnergies. While Big Oil claws back clean energy investment and emissions targets, many of these corporations have increased their acreage for new fossil fuel exploration, while also increasing their fossil fuel production volumes. A study published in PLOS One, “The clean energy claims of BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell: A mismatch between discourse, actions and investments,” does show “clean energy” becoming bigger among the main fossil fuel corporations, but as an article in The Guardian showed that this increase was all bigger talk:

The study found a sharp rise in mentions of “climate”, “low-carbon” and “transition” in annual reports in recent years, especially for Shell and BP, and increasing pledges of action in strategies. But concrete actions were rare and the researchers said: “Financial analysis reveals a continuing business model dependence on fossil fuels along with insignificant and opaque spending on clean energy.”

I’m not even going to explicate the backtracking on public clean energy commitments from Big Oil, at least other than to point out the history of greenwashing. These corporations use vague terminology and misleading advertising to suggest they are green, clean champions. Fortunately, this tactic is increasingly seen for what it is, and what it is is bullshit.

Carbon Capture and Storage and other Tech Promises that aren’t even on the Horizon

And then there is Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a long-held promise from the fossil fuel companies, clasped to their corporate bosoms as “a key climate solution.” Well, this remains a promise, and an underwhelming one at that. The vast majority of what limited progress has been made with CCS is used, it turns out, to produce more oil through Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), effectively extending the life of fossil fuel projects. Yay!

Here’s a quick summary of CCS, from a FAQ on the website of The Center for International Environmental Law:

What does the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say about the use of CCS?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges that many climate models that employ CCS to meet climate targets assume the availability and efficacy of CCS despite the lack of real-world examples. The IPCC cautions against overreliance on CCS and related technologies, noting their future deployment is uncertain, they face multiple feasibility constraints, and could have adverse impacts on human rights and ecosystems. The modeled pathways that provide the greatest chance of staying below 1.5ºC (2.7°F) without overshoot (experiencing global temperature increases beyond 1.5°C) avoid reliance on CCS and BECCS and instead focus on rapid and dramatic phaseout of fossil fuels.

Well, a “rapid and dramatic phaseout of fossil fuels” is definitely not a promise Big Oil is making. Pointing to future technology is another kind of dodge. What is largely left of Big Oil’s net-zero pledges depends on unproven or inefficient technology, like large-scale carbon capture, that has a history of overpromising and has consistently failed to deliver. “Green hydrogen” is another misdirect, in that no tech currently exists to make green hydrogen energy effectively and efficiently, and pretty much any and all hydrogen projects, white, green, or blue, are more PR than likely real contributors. I’m not saying there will never be any role for hydrogen, but I am saying that the claims of green hydrogen on the part of Big Oil is a promise that holds the same sort of weight as hydrogen.

Is hydrogen a potential value, especially for certain high-heat industrial processes? Sure thing. What’s not sure is how we produce the hydrogen, and some projects aimed at doing exactly that use natural gas as feedstock and/or energy source, which sort of defeats the purpose. Another approach is to use only renewable energy to drive the manufacturing of hydrogen, whether through electrolysis or other techniques, but that defeats the primary purpose of building out clean energy, which should be used for electricity production for the growing demand and to replace fossil fuel generation. Green hydrogen is getting a lot of attention and support from many governments, tech-heads, and investors. RMI in an article titled, “Hydrogen State of the Union: Where We Stand in 2024,” believes that green hydrogen is “at an inflection point on an S-curve—not a slow, gradual transition but a rapid adoption of a powerful tool to decarbonize the most difficult parts of our modern economy.”

Well, from RMI’s lips to god’s ear, but being at the start of the S-curve makes it likely that we’re years away from anything approaching a workable industry that can significantly contribute towards decarbonization.

And in the hands of Big Oil? Slower yet, or nonexistent.

I promise.