Energy Illustrated: bpNetZero edition

welcome to a special edition of Energy Illustrated today's topic aiming for net zero emissions in February we launched a new ambition for BP to be a Net Zero company by 2050 or sooner and to help the world get to Net Zero that ambition is underpinned by 10 aims in today's episode we'll be answering a common question about three of those aims aim one which is for BP to be Net Zero on an absolute basis across our entire operations by 2050 or sooner and aim to to be Net Zero for carbon in the oil and gas we produce and aimed 3 which is to cut the carbon intensity of the products we sell by 50% by 2050 or sooner and the question we get about these aims is how do our aims for scope one two and three emissions fit together and why have we chosen to focus our scope three Net Zero aim on our oil and gas production rather than on the products we sell such as fuels right let's get going aim one is fairly easy to explain we aim to be Net Zero on an absolute basis across our entire operations by 2050 or sooner and the word operations is key here you can see that in 2019 all our assets our rakes refinery ships and so on all together generated roughly 55 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions which includes co2 and methane of that total 50 million tons our direct emissions so-called scope one and five million our indirect emissions such as the emissions from other people's power stations when they supply the electricity that powers our operations these are scoped to emissions and you can see here some of the potential levers to reduce these emissions to Net Zero moving on to aim to aim to covers roughly 360 million tons of emissions that fall into scope 3 these are emissions generated if the oil and gas reproduced gets combusted now here's where it gets a bit complex once produced oil and gas often changes hands many times before it's ultimately combusted by an end user perhaps in their car it has likely been bought and sold many times each molecule of carbon only needs to be made Net Zero once between coming out of the ground and being combusted once it's been made Net Zero the whole chain from here to here is Net Zero so we needed to pick one point in the chain and say we aim to be Net Zero for this point in the chain and if the same could be done for all the oil gas and coal at the same point in the chain then the energy system would be net zero for all of the carbon flowing through it and we picked the point of production over here where the oil and gas comes out of the ground it makes sense for us because most of our investment goes into oil and gas production which over time we aim to shift towards our non oil and gas businesses and for the world to reach Net Zero absolute reductions in oil and gas will be needed finally this approach is probably the most straightforward - the easiest for people to understand and to account for now as well as producing oil and gas we also supply a lot of energy products to consumers gas power and fuels like gasoline and jet fuel this is shown by this big arrow here the green part of the arrow is the products we sell that are made from our own oil and gas production the red part is the products we buy in from someone else meaning that another producer got them out of the ground you can see that the red part is much thicker than the green part that's because much more of what we sell comes from someone else's oil and gas I'll explain what we're aiming to do about the products we sell in a moment but first let's take a moment to think about what's needed for us to be a NetZero company for the whole energy system to be Net Zero it needs to get to Net Zero for the carbon flowing through it and for all the operations along the way our aim one is to be Net Zero for our part of those operations and our aim 2 is to be Net Zero for a share of the carbon flowing through it the green part of the arrow I've explained that we only needed to pick one point in the chain for the carbon so put aims 1 and 2 together and you've got a Net Zero company because we're aiming to do something which would make the whole system Net Zero if they happened for the rest of the operations and carbon in the system - so to become a Net Zero company we don't believe it's necessary for us to aim for Net Zero for someone else's oil and gas production the red part of the arrow as well as for our own we don't think that would make sense turning now to how we go about reducing carbon here you can see some of the potential levers the world can use to get the energy system to Net Zero such as offsetting and carbon capture use and storage these are useful and necessary parts of the solution but it's not realistic to rely solely on offsetting there must be a transformation of the whole energy system including all the ways energy is used because if that doesn't happen just taking out most of the carbon will leave the world massively short of energy leaving cars trucks planes and ships with no usable fuel homes with no heat this transformation needs everyone to play their part producers sellers policymakers and everyone who uses energy and we plan to play a leading role aim three so in addition to aims one and two to get BP to net zero we have a third aim to cut by half the carbon intensity of what we sell by 2050 or sooner carbon intensity is the amount of carbon emitted per unit of energy consumed as well as our own products that takes into account the products we sell that produced by others you can see here some of the levers we can use to cut carbon intensity such as selling more electricity to evey drivers and providing more wind or solar power to do this at the scale needed will require consumers to change behaviors and choose low or zero carbon products and that in turn needs to be supported by government policies don't make those products widely available and affordable and attractive to customers someone whose vehicle isn't electric won't buy electricity to power it we hope this helps to explain the thinking behind the first three aims that support our Net Zero ambition we have another seven aims which haven't been covered in this film you can find details of all ten at BP dot-com slash re-imagined thanks for watching let us know what you think either in the comments box or on social media

Channel: bp

Views: 34,530

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Id: f2dr47XFebI

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 22 2020