Shell made £6.1bn ($7.7bn) in profits in the first three months of the year and said it would hand back a further $3.5bn to its shareholders, the i newspaper reports. The profits made by Europe’s largest oil-and-gas firm, which were “more than $1bn higher than experts forecast”, have “sparked a fresh row over its efforts to hit climate change goals”, the newspaper says. It quotes thinktanks and campaigners who say that the company “can’t be trusted to drive the green transition” while it continues to “rake in huge sums of money” from selling fossil fuels. The article also points to a move from a group of Shell investors, “said to include Scottish Widows, Amundi and Axa Investment Managers”, who are urging other shareholders to back a resolution at Shell’s annual general meeting that seeks greater climate action from the firm. According to Sky News, the company attributed its high profits to “strong oil trading and higher refining margins”. Shell earned $7.5bn from oil, gas and petrochemicals in the first quarter of 2024, compared with just $163m from renewables, the Daily Telegraph says. The Financial Times notes that Shell’s rate of production of liquefied natural gas (LNG) was “at the top end of its earlier guidance” and total oil and gas production was up 10% compared with the final quarter of 2023 “because of lower maintenance in Australia and Qatar”. In other Shell news, Yale Environment 360 has a story about “how one South African community stopped Shell oil in its tracks”, concerning efforts by local campaigners to stop the company prospecting along the country’s Wild Coast.

Fourteen years after the Deepwater Horizon disaster that caused the largest marine oil spill in history, BP is “again betting big” on the Gulf of Mexico, according to the Wall Street Journal. The newspaper notes that BP “pulled back from frontier exploration in favour of its green-energy pivot in recent years under former chief executive Bernard Looney”, meaning it is not involved in major new oil discoveries in Namibia and Guyana, and is instead focusing on its Gulf of Mexico business. Writing in Bloomberg, columnist Javier Blas says of BP’s deep water Kaskida oilfield that “environmentalists, climate activists and left-leaning US lawmakers are unlikely to be enthusiastic about the prospect of the British oil major drilling a complex and challenging well in the Gulf of Mexico of all places”. 

Meanwhile, the Daily Telegraph has a story about top oil executive, Scott Sheffield, who has been barred from the board of ExxonMobil due to allegations he colluded with the Opec+ group of oil-producing nations to raise oil prices. Reuters reports that ExxonMobil is “optimistic and pushing forward” with the major Rovuma liquefied natural gas (LNG) project in Mozambique. Quartz reports on a new US congressional report focusing on how US companies “have been lying for decades about their role in climate change”. It references reporting by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News from 2015 – which Inside Climate News has republished to mark the occasion – showing that oil companies had purposely misled the public about climate change. According to Quartz, the congressional report says that while the oil companies “publicly rejected” the reporting at the time, they “internally did not dispute the findings”.

In related news, the Financial Times reports – on its frontpage – that Russian energy giant Gazprom “plunged to its biggest loss in at least a quarter of a century after gas sales more than halved in the fallout from Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine”. It says: “The loss of Rbs629bn ($6.9bn) in 2023 underlines how the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine has ravaged the state-owned natural gas monopoly, leading to plummeting sales in Europe, its main source of income. Gazprom’s revenues fell almost 30% year-on-year to Rbs8.5tn, with gas sales dropping from Rbs8.4tn to Rbs4.1tn.” The Guardian, Reuters, Al Jazeera and Bloomberg all have the story.

Canadian federal climate policies have “begun to make a dent” in the nation’s overall greenhouse gas emissions, but those from its large oil-sands industry “continue to climb”, according to the Globe and Mail. The figures, from Canada’s latest national inventory report, “raise questions” about how the country can meet its emissions targets as fossil-fuel producers ramp up production to supply the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion system, the newspaper continues. Canadian emissions actually rose in 2022 as the economy “rebounded” from the pandemic slowdown, but the government noted they were the lowest they had been in 25 years aside from the pandemic years, CBC News reports. It quotes environment minister Steven Guilbeault, who says the numbers showed the country remains on track for its 2030 goal, which is to cut emissions by 40% below 2005 levels by 2030, with a short-term target to cut them by 20% by 2026. The article notes that emissions in 2022 were only 7% lower than 2005, meaning “there is still a significant amount of work to do”. The Energy Mix says that Canada’s oil and gas emissions grew by 1m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) in 2022, with the sector accounting for 31% of the total. Within this, it says Alberta oil sands were the biggest contributor to the industry’s total emissions. 

Elsewhere, the Financial Times has an article about Canada’s recently completed Trans Mountain pipeline – the most expensive infrastructure project in the nation’s history, which almost triples its pipeline capacity. “The expansion speaks to the persistence of Canada’s oil industry, the world’s fourth largest by production volume. It also highlights the tensions in the climate and energy policy of prime minister Justin Trudea,” the newspaper explains.

In an “exclusive” story, the Guardian reports on its frontpage that the UK’s North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), which regulates North Sea oil and gas production, will allow companies to search for fossil fuels underneath offshore wind power sites for the first time. The authority is set to announce today that it is granting licences to around 30 oil and gas companies to explore at sites set aside for future windfarms, the newspaper continues. It cites sources who say the exploration phase will not involve any drilling, the companies initially assessing whether sites have the potential to provide profitable extraction opportunities. The article also notes that while supporters say low-carbon power from the windfarms could be used to power any future drilling platforms, experts point out that “emissions from burning any oil and gas produced will far outweigh whatever is saved in the drilling and extraction processes”. The article quotes the former Conservative MP and “net-zero tsar” Chris Skidmore, who calls the move “a deeply irresponsible and divisive move that goes against all advice from the International Energy Agency or the UN, and regrettably will further set back the UK’s climate reputation”. Meanwhile, BusinessGreen has published an extract from Skidmore’s address to Sustainable Investment Forum Europe, in which he says “there is no room for new oil and gas, and certainly no room for countries to finance new oil and gas projects”.

In more windfarm news, the Times reports that Ørsted, the world’s largest wind developer, has reported an increase in profits during the first quarter of 2024, after a period in which the industry has struggled with high interest rates and supply chain issues. The Financial Times has an interview with Ørsted chief executive Mads Nipper, who says that high interest rates will continue to inflate renewable energy prices.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Chinese climate envoy Liu Zhenmin argues that US and European concerns around China’s dominance in clean-energy technologies “risk stalling the fight against global warming”. The newspaper also quotes Liu saying “we need to maintain low costs, otherwise nobody is going to be able to afford the energy transition”. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post publishes an opinion article by Wang Huiyao, the founder of the Centre for China and Globalisation, who says that “the global market’s green appetite…dwarfs the capacity of suppliers”. State news outlet China News republishes an article from the WeChat account of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning body, which says that China is “indispensable” to the global energy transition. State-run newspaper China Daily also covers the NDRC article, quoting it saying “equating supply-demand relationship fluctuations with ‘overcapacity’ is a fundamental misunderstanding of how a market economy works”. 

Following reports of a highway collapse in Guangdong province amid heavy rainfall, Reuters says that rescue efforts are continuing and cites Xinhua that the collapse was “triggered by heavy rain”. President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang have both commented on the disaster, calling on local authorities to do a “good job” in rescue efforts, according to state broadcaster CCTV. The Communist party-affiliated newspaper People’s Daily announced that China may see more frequent and more intense rainfall in May, with many areas likely to face a high risk of flooding, hailstorms and high-speed wind.

Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reports that many Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturers have seen increased sales and deliveries in April, “offering a sign of rebounding demand amid continuing price wars and government efforts to spur consumption in the world’s largest EV market”. In an article on Tesla’s deal with Chinese tech company Baidu, Bloomberg quotes BloombergNEF analyst Andrew Grant as saying data collected by Tesla would likely be stored and processed on Baidu hardware, reassuring the Chinese government that “sensitive [data] is not leaving the shores and ending up in one of Tesla’s supercomputers”.

Climate change could leave some parts of northern Australia virtually uninhabitable, “throwing into question” the prospects of some military bases in the area, according to leading defence experts cited by the Sydney Morning Herald. The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group has called for the government to release a declassified version of a security assessment conducted in 2022 concerning the risk of climate change in Australia, the Canberra Times reports. The newspaper quotes former Australian Defence Force chief Chris Barrie, a member of the group, who said climate change has been “missing in action in security analysis”. The group is also calling for the government to set up a dedicated climate threat intelligence unit, which would present annual, declassified briefings to parliament on the threats posed, the article continues. ABC News reports that Barrie has called for the Australian government to move to an effective “wartime” footing on climate change, rather than dedicating “precisely two sentences of substance” to climate impacts on national security in its most recent national defence strategy.

According to a study published yesterday by the German environmental and human rights organisation Urgewald, “international banks continue to finance the coal industry with loans totalling in the hundreds of billions even though a number of states have pledged to phase out climate harmful coal-fired power generation”, reports Der Spiegel. The newspaper details that global banks provided a total of €439bn to coal industry companies between January 2021 and December 2023, which “contradict” the decision of the UN climate summit in Glasgow in 2021 where countries announced “an accelerated phase out of coal”. The outlet adds that those financial institutions include Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank, which, according to Urgewald, continues to finance coal projects “on a large scale”.

Meanwhile, in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), the energy policy spokesman of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), Michael Kruse, criticises economy minister Robert Habeck for taking an “uncoordinated step on coal” after Germany’s nuclear phase-out in 2022. Kruse pointed out that west German coalfields, the federal government, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the energy company RWE had agreed on an early coal phase-out by 2030. However, this does not apply to lignite coal production and power generation in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg, notes the outlet. Nevertheless, Die Zeit reports that Habeck sees no impact on Germany from G7’s decision to phase out coal by 2035. Although Germany aims to phase out coal by 2038, the ruling coalition of SPD, FDP, and Greens agreed to “ideally” bring this step forward to 2030, the outlet adds.

Financial columnist Tom Stevenson writes in the Daily Telegraph about mining company BHP’s attempted bid for Anglo American and what it says about the world’s “insatiable appetite” for copper. He explains how modern growth sectors, such as renewable energy, electric vehicles and artificial intelligence, all require large quantities of copper – and notes that without such “basic materials…there is no net-zero”. He writes: “This is why BHP has alighted on Anglo-American. And why the target has rejected a £30bn bid as ‘highly unattractive’. We should expect BHP to raise its offer and it may also end up in a battle with other potential bidders.” Stevenson explains that buying existing supplies is much easier and cheaper than searching for new sources, and “there aren’t many pure play copper miners available”. A Financial Times editorial also touches on this issue, describing it as a “worrying reality”. It explains: “It is simpler and cheaper to buy out a rival copper miner than to build a new mine. This raises significant concerns for meeting the rising copper demands of the global economy and the green transition.” The editorial adds that the pipeline of new projects is limited and exploration budgets for copper have been falling since the early 2010s. It points to a role for both governments and businesses in speeding up the process.

Meanwhile, in the oil and gas sector, Times chief business commentator Alistair Osborne has a column about Shell’s latest performance figures, in which he reflects on chief executive Wael Sawan’s focus on the “basic fundamentals”. Osborne says Sawan’s predecessor, Ben van Beurden, had “lurch[ed] greenwards” with a strategy to make the oil company net-zero, a move the columnist describes as “ill-defined and dangling questionable returns”. With Sawan’s approach, Osborne writes: “There was…a less hair-shirted approach to cutting oil and gas production coupled with a rethink of what Lord Cameron of Greensill once called ‘green crap’. The focus would not be on one-off projects but investing to help customers make the energy transition.”

A new study finds that implementing a range of CO2 removal methods in urban areas could mitigate up to 1bn tonnes of CO2 annually by 2050. Researchers examine four primary methods of carbon sequestration: direct capture of CO2 from buildings, removal of CO2 through parks, trees and green roofs, storing carbon in soils and using timber in construction. They find that storing CO2 in the built environment – that is, using building materials with carbon storage capacity – has the largest potential for drawing down CO2. However, they note that the storage potential of each method likely varies significantly from place to place, adding that “quantitative estimates are plagued by uncertainties from the available, yet still patchy, science today”.