Italy's Eni expects its oil production to start declining after 2025 under its new long-term strategy to rely on natural gas, renewables, and new technologies to cut net greenhouse gas emissions of its energy products by 80 percent by 2050.
In its Long-Term Strategic Plan to 2050 and Action Plan 2020-2023, the Italian oil and gas group set out an ambitious target to obtain by 2050 an 80-percent reduction in net scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions, referring to the entire life cycle of the energy products it sells.
Thus, Eni joins other Big Oil firms from Europe who have recently pledged reductions in scope 3 emissions, that is, the carbon footprint of the energy products that companies sell.
A week after new CEO Bernard Looney took over from Bob Dudley as BP's boss, BP unveiled earlier this month a plan to achieve net zero carbon footprint across BP's operations on an absolute basis by 2050 or sooner. The oil major also aims to halve the carbon intensity of the products it sells by 2050 or sooner, joining other companies such as Shell and Equinor, which also target to reduce the carbon footprint of the energy products that they sell.
Eni's plan today includes upstream production growth at an annual rate of 3.5 percent up to 2025, and a decline in oil and gas production after that, mainly for oil. By 2050, gas production would account for around 85 percent of Eni's total production, the company said.
Apart from higher gas production and projects for forest conservation and CO2 capture and storage, Eni aims to significantly boost its position in renewables. The company expects to have installed renewables capacity of 3 GW by 2023 and 5 GW by 2025, while installed renewables capacity is set to jump to 55 GW by 2050, with developments mainly in OECD countries.
"We have designed a strategy that combines economic sustainability with environmental sustainability and we have done so by defining an action plan based on technologies - existing or developed in-house - that we know how to implement. This will allow Eni to be a leader in the market supplying decarbonised energy products and actively contributing to the energy transition process," Eni's chief executive Claudio Descalzi said in a statement.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More