Our transformation
The world wants and needs a better and more balanced energy system – one that delivers energy that is secure, affordable and lower carbon.
And, not or
Our strategy helps us to do both – increasing investment in the transition to lower carbon energy and keeping oil and gas flowing where it’s needed today.
And while today we’re mostly in oil and gas, we’ve increased global investment into our lower carbon and other transition businesses (what we call our ‘transition growth engines’) from around 3% in 2019 to around 30% last year. Our five growth engines are; bioenergy, EV charging, convenience, hydrogen and renewables & power. We plan to continue to increase investment into these – alongside oil and gas, a sign that bp’s wider transformation is underway turning plans into action.
In 2022, low carbon activity investment, a subset of our total transition growth investment, accounted for more than 80% of our total aim 5 investment - that’s our aim to increase the proportion of investment we make into our non-oil and gas businesses. It increased from $2.2 billion in 2021 to over $4 billion last year.
The level – and proportion – of the overall investment going into our transition growth engines, or into the low carbon activity subset, may vary as we pursue our target and aim. More details of our progress are on pages 22 and 23 in our net zero ambition progress update:
Our “and, not or” approach is in progress across the UK.
The North Sea has been an important part of our business for nearly 60 years. Today, we continue to provide energy through a portfolio focused around five key production hubs in the central North Sea and west of Shetland.
Over the last 12 months we have been undertaking major seismic survey work west of Shetland to inform further development of high-quality UK oil and gas with some of those activities pictured. We also secured planning permission for a 1.25km pipeline at Sullom Voe Terminal, Shetland, to help protect UK security of gas supply.
Our plans in the North Sea will see us continue to invest to produce resilient hydrocarbons that are aligned with bp’s strategy – that is oil and gas that can be produced with lower operational emissions, safely, reliably, and competitively, maximising the resources and infrastructure around our existing hubs.
We’ve also signed an agreement with other North Sea operators to explore options to electrify oil and gas facilities in the west of Shetland.
In 2022, we announced our plan to invest £1 billion in the UK over the next 10 years in electric vehicle charging, focussing on the roll-out of fast, convenient charging so that we can provide more drivers with access to our charging points whenever and wherever they are.
Last year, as part of this plan, we teamed up with Addison Lee to give the private hire firm’s growing EV fleet enhanced access to bp pulse’s network and announced an agreement with Marks and Spencer to bring 900 EV charge points to around 70 store locations in two years.
More recently we’ve opened bp pulse’s fastest, most powerful and largest EV charging hub in the UK to date in Kettering, North Northamptonshire, featuring ten 300kW chargers, equating to 20 150kW charge points, each capable of adding up to 100 miles in around 15 minutes.
In 2022 bp pulse installed around 118,000 kW of public charging capacity. Our focus is on high-speed, reliable charging and, by 2030, we plan to increase the number of rapid and ultra fast chargers fivefold.
Our EV charging and convenience transition growth engines can work together, with customers able to get coffee and range of Wild Bean Café offers, M&S Simply Food, and other branded food and products at many of our locations.
The Teesside industrial cluster, with its rich industrial history, is in a tightly packed area with a radius of seven square kilometres, making it well-suited for decarbonisation.
We're backing hydrogen, power and carbon capture and storage projects in the area to help Teesside and the UK decarbonize power, hydrogen and industry.
Net Zero Teesside Power (NZT Power) is set to be one of the world’s first commercial scale gas-fired power stations with carbon capture. The proposed combined cycle gas turbine plant will have a planned electrical output of up to 860 megawatts (MW), enough to power around 1.3 million homes per year.
H2Teesside aims to be one of the UK’s largest blue hydrogen production facilities, targeting 1.2GW of hydrogen production by 2030, over 10% of the UK government’s hydrogen target for 2030.
NZT Power and H2Teesside, were selected in March 2023 among Track-1 Capture Projects to proceed to negotiations for government funding support with The Department for Energy Security & Net Zero (DESNZ).
H2 Teesside will soon be launching a public consultation as part of the DCO (Development Consent Order) process and a final investment decision could be taken in 2024.
bp is also the lead partner in the Northern Endurance Partnership (NEP), which will enable the East Coast Cluster (“ECC”) by providing the common infrastructure needed to transport CO2 from emitters in the Humber & Teesside to secure offshore storage in the North Sea. Two years ago, the ECC was selected by the UK government as one of the UK’s Track-1 carbon capture and storage clusters. Once operational, the cluster has the potential to transport and securely store nearly 50% of all UK industrial cluster CO2 emissions – around 23 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year - by the mid 2030s.
NZT Power and H2 Teesside are both part of the East Coast Cluster.
HyGreen Teesside aims to be one of the biggest green hydrogen facilities in the UK, targeting 80 megawatt electrical (Mwe) of green hydrogen capacity by 2025 and an expansion of up to 500 MWe by 2030. The project could help fuel the development of Teesside into the UK’s first major hydrogen transport hub, leading the way for large-scale decarbonization of heavy transport, airports, ports and rail in the UK.
In August 2023, the UK government announced that HyGreen was among a group of 17 green hydrogen projects progressing to the next stage of negotiations with DESNZ’s Hydrogen Business Model (HBM) and Net Zero Hydrogen Fund (NZHF) programmes, which aim to kickstart the low carbon hydrogen economy across the UK and support commercial deployment.
A final investment decision is expected in 2024.
We aim to be a global leader in safely developing, building, operating and owning offshore wind farms. We’re making waves towards this, developing cutting-edge offshore wind farms in the Irish and North Sea that will be capable of contributing to the UK’s 50-gigawatt and Scotland’s 11-gigawatt wind power targets by 2030.
In March 2023, we were successful in our INTOG bid to develop our innovation demonstrator floating offshore wind project off the coast of Aberdeenshire. As we look to significantly build our offshore wind footprint around the world, we expect this to increasingly include floating options, and this is one exciting first step.
With our partner EnBW, the wind farms in the Irish and North Sea which we are developing together could generate enough energy to power the equivalent of around six million UK homes every year.
This year we signed Agreements for Lease with The Crown Estate for the Morgan and Mona offshore wind projects, completed another round of community consultations, and the first secondees from X-Academy, a capability accelerator providing on-the-job project experience and formal learning, joined us to work on the Morven project.
In May 2023 we announced our dedicated Morven joint venture team office in Edinburgh, which provides another hub for bp and EnBW, strengthening the partnership and we continued our biggest-ever offshore integrated site survey involving specialist vessels and crews. Whilst there are more steps to come, we are on our way to delivering our offshore wind plans in the UK.
Around 6 million homes per year:
- With our partner EnBW, we’re developing up to 5.9GW gross of electricity generation capacity from offshore wind from 3 offshore wind projects in the North Sea and Irish Sea.
- We estimate they’ll have the potential to provide enough electricity for around 6 million UK homes.
- This figure is based on the most recently available average domestic household electricity consumption and load factor figures. Load factor refers to the actual output of a turbine benchmarked against its theoretical maximum yearly output.
- Average domestic household electricity consumption in the UK – 3898kWh (As at 2021 figure from BEIS ECUK numbers published Sept 2022).
- Application of a load or net capacity factor of 47.57 %. This factor is the median of the RUK recommendation of BEIS "all wind": (onshore + offshore) of 31.84% and the DESNZ load factor for new build offshore wind of 63.3% for delivery years 2028/2029 and 2029/2030 as set out in the Contracts for Difference Scheme for renewable electricity generation Allocation Round 5: Allocation Framework, 2023.