If you want to improve your internal capability for gathering and reporting carbon footprint data, it may be helpful to see how your competitors look like from outside.

Future Energy Partners looked at the carbon data from 12 E&P companies – Aker BP, Diversified Energy, Energean, Enquest, Harbour Energy, Ithaca Energy, Jadestone Energy, Neptune Energy, Savannah Energy, Scirocco Energy, Seplat Energy, Serica Energy, to see their data for ‘scope 1 and 2 emissions’ – from operations, flaring and methane leaks.

We are not going to reveal our judgement about any specific company for legal reasons but can show an overall picture.

We looked separately at ‘lagging’ data – data provided in 2022 about emissions in 2021 – and ‘leading data’ – data provided in 2022 about emissions over 2022-2024.

For lagging data, 5 of the 12 provided extensive quantitative data, 2 provided limited quantitative data, 1 provided only qualitative information, 1 largely did not provided data, and 2 did not provide any data at all.

Although nearly all of the quantitative data was what is known as ‘engineering estimates’ – not data directly measured.

For the leading data, 2 companies provided extensive quantitative data, 5 provided limited quantitative data, 4 provided only qualitative information, and 1 did not provide anything.

Only 2 companies had clear plans to move from ‘engineering estimates’ to actual measurements. The qualitative information were statements like “we are increasing gas production which is good”.

Of the 12, only 1 company is performing well in both reporting the past and planning for the future.

If you want your company to be able to provide ‘good’ data, which could be (for example) accepted by a bank as evidence for a ‘carbon margin ratchet’ provision on a loan, we think this shows the pathway you should be moving on – more granular, transparent, quantitative reporting of the past; quantitative data for the future; and show clearly which of your data is ‘engineering estimates’, and where you plan to move to measured data.

It would probably also be helpful if your data was available on a cloud-based system, so you could authorise people from banks to see whatever they wanted about your past and future and see clearly how any calculations have been made. This digital system would need to support high level of transparency, it is clear how it is making its calculations, and high levels of flexibility, since every company’s carbon footprint is different. Any ‘black box’ type system is not going to be suitable.

Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency reported in its 2022 Global Methane Tracker Report, that it estimates that the global energy sector was responsible for 135m tonnes of methane emissions in 2021, which was 5 per cent more than 2020.

The largest source were China (28m tonnes), Russia (18m tonnes) and the US (17m tonnes). 42m tonnes came from coal mine methane, 41m tonnes from oil, 39m tonnes from gas production and transport, 9m tonnes from incomplete combustion of bioenergy (such as wood used for cooking fuel), and 4m tonnes from leaks.

The 122m tonnes of methane leaked from fossil fuel operations (42+41+39) is roughly the same amount as used each year by the European power sector, it said.

You can read our report here 

Future Energy Partners can help you build your internal organisational capacity to gather, report, share and continuously improve carbon footprint data – if you would like to discuss with us how we can help you, please let us know.