Investing in today’s energy system – and tomorrow’s too
bp’s oil and gas business is helping to support the energy transition and securing energy for today’s needs. Our senior vice president of projects, Ewan Drummond, explains how
bp talks about the energy transition in terms of ‘and, not or’. What does this mean for the oil and gas business?
Our approach to the transition is all about balance. Today, oil and gas supplies around 55% of global energy demand1. Weaning the world off its dependence on oil and gas in an orderly way, one that won’t cause the type of shock that we saw with the war in Ukraine, will take time.
“We recognize the immediate need to invest in lower carbon energy solutions, and we’re already under way. The world wants and needs a better and more balanced energy system that delivers secure, affordable and lower carbon energy.”
At the same time, we recognize the immediate need to invest in lower carbon energy solutions, and we’re already under way.
The world wants and needs a better and more balanced energy system that delivers secure, affordable and lower carbon energy. And the transition needs to be orderly. Our oil and gas operations have a fundamental role to play in supporting this transition. We’re increasingly channelling the revenues from this business into lower carbon technologies.
Just as importantly, our lower carbon businesses can draw on our know-how in delivering large-scale oil and gas projects.
Our priority is to produce the energy the world needs safely, responsibly and efficiently.
To deliver that, we’re rethinking the way we produce oil and gas and design our future projects to be as efficient as possible, with lower operational emissions.
To give you a couple of examples:
- We’ve engineered our new Azeri Central East (ACE) facility in the Caspian Sea to be our most technically advanced platform, meaning less travel, fewer shutdowns and outages, and lower flaring and emissions.
- At our Tangguh LNG facility in Indonesia, we recently started up a new production unit that will ultimately increase Tangguh’s LNG production by approximately 50%. And the next phase we’re planning there will include bp’s largest carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) project, where we expect to capture 30 million tonnes of CO2 over the life of the field. I’m really excited about it and so is the government of Indonesia, which has declared it a strategic national project.
How is our oil and gas business accelerating the transition?
While we’re developing high-performing oil and gas assets, we’re also focusing on how these projects can support the development of our transition growth engines: bioenergy, electric vehicle charging, convenience, hydrogen and renewables & power.
The integration with our biofuels and hydrogen businesses is a great example of this.
We’re planning on evolving several of our existing terminals and refineries into ‘integrated energy hubs’, meaning they will continue to supply traditional fuels, while also introducing new, low carbon feedstocks and products.
Take our Kwinana Energy Hub (former oil refinery) in Australia, which we are preparing to convert into a biorefinery, where we plan to produce biofuel products such as sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The proposed biorefinery will integrate with the existing import terminal and plans for renewable hydrogen production at the site.
As well as helping to deliver on our own transition plans, developments like this would provide the underlying infrastructure for our host nations to deliver their own decarbonization objectives.
Just as importantly, we’re working to cut operational emissions, so we are net zero across our entire operations on an absolute basis by 2050 or sooner. We’re making steady progress, electrifying operations in places like the Permian basin in Texas, cutting flaring and using lower carbon energy sources to power our refineries.
Since 2019, we have reduced emissions from our operations by 41%, reduced the carbon intensity of the products we sell by 2%, and decreased our methane intensity to less than half its previous value2.
And,
not or.
The world's transition to a more secure, more affordable, lower carbon energy system needs massive investment in lower carbon energies AND continued investment in oil and gas as the alternatives grow. We're transforming bp to play our part – discover more below
Our transformationbp has more than 100 years’ experience in developing oil and gas projects – how are we applying this knowledge to build a lower carbon energy system?
Between 2016 to 2023, we delivered 41 major projects. That’s a world-class track record in managing the complexity of huge energy infrastructure construction and operation. We’re applying these same skills to developing and growing the new lower carbon energy system.
Ultimately, our project management and engineering expertise underpins the delivery of our targets across all parts of bp. For example, we’ve got subsea project leaders taking on lead roles in developing offshore wind and EV charging hubs. If you understand the technology, the fundamentals of what’s needed to scale these operations in a safe, efficient, cost-effective way are very similar.
Finally, what are you excited about when you look ahead to the future?
When you look at the progress we’ve made to date, and the experience we’re continuing to gain through the diversity of projects we’re delivering, it’s incredibly exciting to think about the role bp can play in the energy transition.
“It’s incredibly exciting to think about the role bp can play in the energy transition.”
Our track record on technology, on industry engagement and our relationships in the regions where we work is strong. We continue to learn and innovate. This is exactly what we are doing with our Kaskida development in the Gulf of Mexico, where a ‘design one, build many’ mindset will allow deployment in other discoveries in the region. And it will be similar for green hydrogen, where we are developing a standardized and programmatic approach to building projects competitively.
So, we’ve got the people, the track record and the project management skills and processes to make a difference. We also have new technologies to scale that will dramatically cut costs and emissions and, ultimately, underpin the global energy transition.
💡 Why it matters
Oil and gas currently supply about 55% of the world’s energy. It’s energy that keeps the lights on, gets us from A to B, and heats our homes. As the world transitions to lower carbon energy sources, we’re playing our part investing in today’s energy system, which is predominantly oil and gas, and at the same time, investing in accelerating the energy transition.
Further investment in oil and gas helps to meet the world’s growing energy consumption, and it can help to fund the transition to lower carbon energy as well. We’ve also increased investment in what we call our ‘transition growth engines’ – bioenergy, EV charging, convenience, hydrogen, and renewables & power – from around 3% in 2019 to around 30% in 2022.
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