Unearthed today: Where is BP placing its bets?

We’re writing about… Where BP spends its low-carbon money 

UK oil company BP is going through some changes right now, it’s fair to say. The company – who’s slogan was once Beyond Petroleum – gave up on most things green during the tenure of its last boss Bob Dudley, investing instead in US shale gas and oil to a massive extent. Now, the new boss Bernard Looney is trying to push them back the other way. The firm has sold its petrochemicals division and written down the value of many of its assets. It’s talking a bold talk about targets, positive lobbying and net zero. But in climate – as in pandemics – it’s the details that matter. 

Luke Barratt has been combing through what data there is available about BP Ventures, officially the company’s low-carbon Venture Capital division – the first thing to say, there’s not that much. BP is involved in hundreds of millions of dollars worth of funding for companies which could reasonably be described as climate positive, the only issue is we don’t know how much of that money comes from BP itself and they won’t tell us (or their investors). Where the data is clearer is on the bets BP is taking alone – and there it’s a less rosy picture. 

Put simply, BP employs a broad definition of low carbon bets which has included so far companies using AI to help drill for oil and a firm generating carbon emissions from fossil fuels to create animal and fish feed are among those to have received substantial investment.

Just 8 days after Looney took charge the company followed up on an AI investment with a firm called “Beyond Limits” with another investment in an AI platform called “Sandy”. The AI used by these firms is designed to support oil extraction, that much is not debated. Indeed in its own press release BP said Sandy was “Aimed at accelerating project lifecycles, from exploration through to reservoir modelling, the technology is targeting a 90% time reduction in data collection, interpretation and simulation.” Put simply, it should make the business of finding and getting oil out of the ground quicker – which I guess makes sense if you think the oil age is coming to a earlier-than-anticipated close, but isn’t really a climate bet unless you count – as the firm does – improved efficiency as a core way of reducing emissions.

More interestingly BP may have shed its interest in plastics, but it’s not abandoned its intention to look for other ways to use its core product. The firm has invested heavily in a company called Calysta which gets bacteria to feed on methane and create either animal or fish feed. The problem here is the science. However you slice and dice it a fossil fuel is being taken out of the ground and injecting carbon into the carbon cycle – in this case in a bid to support two deeply destructive industries.

When Calysta first asked the UK’s Carbon Trust to look at their product they said it was, in carbon terms, pretty awful, noting it would be great if they used bio-gas which sadly doesn’t provide a home for BP’s core product. So, without switching to Biogas, they asked them again, this time with a focus on fish-meal they are manufacturing at scale in China. The data showed that in some circumstances the product would contribute to global warming less than soy protein concentrate or insect meal. In other circumstances, however, it would contribute more – depending on how the Soy is grown. The firm says there are land-use and biodiversity benefits, which may well be true, but that’s not going net-zero, it’s just boosting the supply of feed to a destructive industry in order to find new markets for fossil fuels.

Four things you need to know 

Virus drives shift away from coal except in China: The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated a global shift away from coal with the exception of China, which has expanded plans to build power stations using the fuel, data show. In addition to financing coal abroad the country approved the highest number of new plants in the first six months of this year since 2016. “It’s hard to overstate the degree to which China is driving coal power development,” Christine Shearer, an analyst at Global Energy Monitor, told the FT.

A quarter of Bangladesh is flooded, as climate change hits those least responsible for it: Torrential rains have submerged at least a quarter of Bangladesh, the New York Times reports. As the climate changes the rains are more unpredictable and the river is rising above dangerous levels far more frequently than it did before, according to 35 years of flooding data analyzed by A.K.M. Saiful Islam, a water management expert at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Dhaka. “People are losing whatever little they have,” said Farah Kabir, the Bangladesh country director for ActionAid International. “When and how are they going to be supported? When is the global community going to take responsibility?”

New homes to get ‘automatic’ permission in England planning shake-up: The mysteriously-still-a-minister Robert Jenrick announced a “permission in principle” will be given to developments on land designated “for renewal” to speed-up building – raising concerns about the quality of housing that will be built, it’s efficiency and the fate of anything environmentally important that doesn’t happen to live on a green belt or Area of Natural Beauty. 

Amazon forests ravaged by 6,800 blazes in a month: Brazil’s space agency said that the number of fires in the Amazon was up by 28 per cent from the same time last year. Satellite images showed 6,803 new forest fires were started, a three-year high for the month of July, The Times reports.