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* For a Factbox of Big Oil's climate targets, see
* European companies ahead of U.S. peers
* Targets are not easy to compare
(Adds Total's new climate targets)
By Shadia Nasralla and Ron Bousso
LONDON, May 5 (Reuters) - Europe's top oil and gas
companies, which account for roughly 7% of global crude
consumption, have committed themselves to greenhouse gas
emission reduction targets which vary in scope and detail,
making them hard for investors to compare.
Many climate ambitions among oil majors relate to results
three decades into the future and depend on carbon offsets,
whose availability is finite, and carbon capture and storage, a
technology not currently deployed at commercial scale.
What does this mean, say, for the carbon footprint of a car
driver at a petrol station?
If we take BP as an example, emissions from its own
barrels, from wellhead to passenger car exhaust, amount to
around 415 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent a year.
BP says it will reduce these emissions - roughly the same as
Britain's annual emissions - to net zero by 2050.
The net zero target does not cover crude and refined
products that BP trades but which are initially brought out of
the ground by other producers, a total which is much larger than
the oil and gas BP produces itself. It says it aims to halve the
carbon density of all energy that it trades by 2050.
BP's peer Royal Dutch Shell has the oil and gas
sector's broadest plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to net
zero by 2050, although it depends on pivoting "towards serving
businesses and sectors that by 2050 are also net-zero
emissions".
This means Shell relies on its customers' choices to reach
its aim.
French major Total pledged to cut to zero the
greenhouse gas emissions from its operations, such as oil
fields, globally by 2050. Such emissions from a group's
operations and from the electricity used for them are also known
as Scope 1 and 2.
But its broader 2050 net zero carbon plan covering emissions
from fuels made from the oil and gas it extracts, such as
gasoline, and sold to customers - also known as Scope 3 - only
applies to Europe.
As for emissions from its global fuel sales, it wants to
reduce the carbon intensity of energy products used by Total
customers by 2050 to less than 27.5 grammes CO2 equivalent per
megajoule.
An intensity-based target allows for absolute emissions to
increase if volumes sold go up.
Equinor has also pledged to halve the intensity of
the energy products it produces and sells by 2050, but its
methodology is based on its equity oil and gas output, rather
than every drop of fuel it sells.
Eni, conversely, committed to cut its absolute
emissions from all products it sells by 80% and said its oil
output would shrink from 2025.
Still, European oil and gas producers' climate ambitions are
way ahead of their U.S. peers ExxonMobil, Chevron
and ConocoPhillips.
(Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
