Woodside has doubled the quantity of carbon emissions it’s chargeable for pumping into the ambiance in simply two years.
Australia’s biggest local weather prison, Woodside, has doubled its carbon emissions prior to now two years, and elevated by greater than 10% the emissions depth of the vitality it produces, the corporate admits in its newest efficiency report.
The downstream “scope 3” emissions from its fossil fuels — emissions from the usage of the fossil fuels it exports — have been calculated by the corporate at 35.6 megatonnes of CO2-equivalent (CO2-e) again in 2021. Final yr, scope 3 emissions exceeded 71 megatonnes, the corporate’s “local weather report” revealed this week. And the general carbon emissions depth of the vitality Woodside bought rose by 12% to 65 grams CO2-e per megajoule.
Towards this doubling of emissions, Woodside is promising to abate simply 5 megatonnes of scope 3 CO2-e by 2030 — a web discount of simply 7% of its complete, or lower than half of the rise between 2022 and 2023. The corporate has no precise goal in relation to its scope 3 emissions — these 5 megatonnes could find yourself being abated towards a whole lot of megatonnes of scope 3 emissions if Woodside continues its spree of opening new gasoline fields with the encouragement of the federal authorities.
That’s not the tip to Woodside’s local weather nonsense, nonetheless. Its scope 3 abatement targets embrace discredited carbon seize know-how, which it repeatedly spruiks in its local weather report. The corporate claims it’s “evaluating”, “investigating”, “aiming to speed up” and “modelling” a variety of carbon seize applied sciences, regardless of the repeated failure of carbon seize and storage in even the best and most simple of circumstances.
Regardless of this file of failure, Woodside claims “CCS is a mature know-how which represents a confirmed answer to abate large-scale industrial emissions”. Remarkably, it teams carbon seize with wind know-how:
We acknowledge that not everybody shares our views, for instance in regards to the position of pure gasoline within the vitality transition, simply as some folks will debate the desirability of nuclear energy, wind farms or carbon seize.
Woodside claims to “align its advocacy to assist the objectives of the Paris Settlement”, though nowhere does it explicitly declare its operations are per limiting world temperature will increase to effectively under 2°C or with efforts to restrict temperature enhance to 1.5°C. Doubling emissions — even in a fantasy world the place carbon seize really works — is constant solely with a dramatic enhance in world temperatures.