* Aims to halve Scope 3 emissions by 2050
* To merge upstream and downstream businesses
(Adds details)
By Ron Bousso and Shadia Nasralla
LONDON, Feb 12 (Reuters) - BP pledged to sharply reduce its
carbon emissions by 2050 as part of a reinvention of the
111-year old company by newly-appointed chief executive Bernard
Looney.
BP on Wednesday set more ambitious targets than rivals such
as Royal Dutch Shell and Total but fell short
of commitments made by smaller Spanish peer Repsol.
“We need to reinvent BP," Looney said in a statement.
The world’s top oil and gas companies have come under heavy
pressure from investors and climate activists to fall in line
with the 2015 Paris climate accord which aims to limit global
warming to below 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.
"The world’s carbon budget is finite and running out fast;
we need a rapid transition to net zero. We all want energy that
is reliable and affordable, but that is no longer enough. It
must also be cleaner," he added.
U.S. groups such as Exxon, Chevron and
ConocoPhillips are far less ambitious with their
greenhouse gas related targets than their European rivals.
BP said it plans to halve the intensity of the carbon
emissions of the oil and gas products it sells, known as Scope 3
emissions, by 2050.
A pioneering "Beyond Petroleum" plan in the early 2000s to
build a large renewables business ended with huge losses.
Over the past two years, Europe’s top oil and gas companies
have ceded some ground to growing investor pressure to tackle
climate change by reducing carbon emissions.
Intensity-based targets measure the amount of greenhouse gas
(GHG) emissions per unit of energy or barrel of oil and gas
produced. That means that absolute emissions can rise with
growing production, even if the headline intensity metric falls.
Scope 3 emissions vastly exceed greenhouse gases caused by
the production of crude oil, natural gas and refined products,
including electricity generation, typically by a factor of about
six among oil majors, according to Reuters calculations.
In one of its biggest changes, BP will dismantle the
traditional model of an oil and gas production, or upstream,
unit and a refining, trading and marketing, or downstream, unit.
Its new organisation includes four units: Production and
Operations; Customers and Products; Gas and Low Carbon Energy;
and Innovation & Engineering.
(Reporting by Shadia Nasralla, editing by Louise Heavens and
Alexander Smith)