Climate change and the energy transition
Energy with purpose means helping the world reach net zero
Why it matters
The world is not on a sustainable path and needs a rapid transition to lower carbon energy in order to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
What we want to do
This will involve meeting growing demand with energy that is cleaner, as well as reliable and affordable.
Our approach
To advance a low carbon future by working across the whole of BP. This includes our ‘reduce, improve, create’ (RIC) framework.
Our climate change stories highlight some of BP's environmental and social initiatives from around the world
As part of our My Advancing Low Carbon programme (My ALC), BP employees in the UK and the US can offset their carbon emissions from personal travel and home energy use.
Employees can choose the carbon emissions profile that best matches their lifestyle and BP Target Neutral provides offsets for their carbon footprint. The programme supports high-quality carbon credits from a range of carefully selected projects on a not-for-profit basis. Each project helps to reduce carbon emissions while contributing to improving the lives of millions of people.
Since the programme was launched at the end of 2019, BP employees in the UK and US have chosen to offset the equivalent of 31,800 flights between London Heathrow and Houston, or the removal of 6,900 passenger cars from the roads for a year.
The more employees who enrol, the greater the low carbon benefit and as BP pays 50% of the cost to encourage this, making a difference costs less per month than a cup of coffee.
The BP Angola team operating the offshore Greater Plutonio project achieved sustainable emissions reductions of 1.5MteCO2 over a 12 month period 2018-2019, while also increasing production by 14mboed during the same period.
The team set out with a simple objective – to reduce GHG emissions and not waste energy.
They explored ways to reduce flaring using a tool called APEX, which enabled them to create simulated duplications of the entire operational network. They explored possible improvement measures by simulating a range of operational scenarios, then tested these in live field trials. The team say they were genuinely astonished by the success of this process, which highlighted the ‘sweet spot’ in terms of their compression and separation systems.
The reduction in flaring was immediate and visible to the human eye, with gas being sent down to the Angola liquid natural gas plant onshore, rather than wasted. Not only did BP Angola achieve CO2 reductions and efficiency improvements, it was also recognized as the winner in the Advancing Low Carbon category of the 2019 BP Helios awards.
a. Methane intensity refers to the amount of methane emissions from BP’s operated upstream oil and gas assets as a percentage of the total gas that goes to market from those operations. Our methodology is aligned with the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative’s (OGCI).
Net Zero Teesside is an integrated CCUS project that will store the CO2 emissions from carbon intensive industries situated in the Teesside industrial cluster. The project aims to decarbonize a number of carbon-intensive businesses by as early as 2030 and deliver the UK’s first zero-carbon industrial cluster.
Teesside industries account for 5.6% of industrial emissions in the UK and the area is home to five of the UK’s top 25 CO2 emitters. The project is being developed to store up to 6Mte of carbon dioxide each year – the equivalent to the annual energy use of over two million homes.
Although details are still being finalized, the project would comprise both onshore and offshore elements, potentially:
- A high efficiency gas-fired power station, including carbon capture plant, that can deliver low carbon gas power locally and nationally.
- CO2 pipeline infrastructure connecting the power plant and nearby heavy industrial facilities. Industries capturing CO2 from their own processes would have access to this network so that their CO2 can be transported and stored.
- A pipeline for the onward transport of CO2 to the offshore storage site.
- Offshore, a geologically secure site deep under the North Sea where the CO2 will be permanently stored. This will be either a saline aquifer or a depleted oil or gas field. Sites in the southern North Sea have around 1,000Mt of available storage capacity, enough for many decades of storage.
The project is owned by OGCI Climate Investments as a non-operating shareholder and is being developed on its behalf by five OGCI member companies.
As the project progresses, government funding and supportive policy will be crucial to making the project economically viable. The project won £3.8 million in funding as part of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy’s call for CCUS Innovation Programme in 2019 and is expected to continue to be funded by the consortium of five OGCI member companies.
Leading companies – from food, drink and consumer goods giants to waste management, packaging and recycling specialists – have joined forces with BP in a new consortium to help tackle plastic waste by accelerating the commercialization of BP Infinia enhanced recycling technology.
BP, Britvic, Danone, Unilever, ALPLA and REMONDIS have combined their capability and experience to develop a new circular approach to dealing with polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic waste. In particular, they will work to speed up bringing the recycling technology to market in order to target the difficult-to-recycle plastic food trays and coloured bottles that are currently thrown away.
BP Infinia is an enhanced recycling technology designed to turn opaque and difficult-to-recycle PET plastic waste into recycled feedstocks that can be used to make new, high-quality PET plastic packaging again and again, with no loss in quality. The aim is to create an even stronger circular PET economy where all items and applications in future can be recycled back into their original purpose.
We plan to build a $25 million pilot plant in the US to prove the technology on a continuous basis, which we have targeted to be operational around the end of 2020.
BP Bunge Bioenergia operates in Brazil, the world’s second largest and most integrated market for ethanol as a transport fuel. Around 75% of all road vehicles in the country are able to run on ethanol. In 2019 ethanol demand increased by 10% compared with 2018 and is set to increase by up to 55% by 2030.
The joint venture operates 11 biofuel sites in Brazil, of which eight were previously operated by Bunge and three by BP. These sites provide annual crushing capacity of 32 million metric tonnes and
BP Bunge Bioenergia is ranked as the second largest player in the sugarcane ethanol biofuel industry in Brazil based on its effective crushing capacity. It has the flexibility to produce a mix of ethanol and sugar.
In addition to its core operation, BP Bunge Bioenergia generates enough renewable energy, fuelled by biomass from the sugarcane it uses, to power all its sites and sell surplus electricity to the Brazilian power grid.
BP is expanding its digital energy portfolio by investing in an exciting energy management company called Grid Edge.
The technology uses artificial intelligence to help businesses and other organizations use energy more efficiently by predicting, controlling and optimizing their buildings’ energy profiles. Sophisticated cloud-based software creates predictive data by anticipating a building’s energy profile by drawing on multiple data sources, including weather forecasts, expected occupancy levels and periods of high renewable power generation. Effectively, Grid Edge technology enables customers to use their building’s flexibility in energy demand and generation like a giant battery, to reduce costs and carbon emissions.
Already in use in the UK in buildings such as the Bullring shopping centre, Birmingham, and Birmingham Airport, Grid Edge has helped organizations to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions.
Where better for BP to test our EV charging aspirations at scale than in China? The country is home to the largest and fastest-developing EV market, with 50% of all battery EVs currently running on its roads.
We’re involved in a number of joint ventures and are investing in innovative businesses. These include a joint venture with DiDi to provide fast-charge and convenience services that use DiDi’s app-based platform. This platform is currently accessed by around 550 million users and serves one million EVs.
We’ve also opened the first BP-branded fuel station that offers fast-charge services in China, through a joint venture with Dongming Petrochemical.