Industrial giants such as Shell, BP and chemical company Dow have a much greater climate impact than their competitors. The companies produce less efficiently, which means that they emit many hundreds of thousands of additional tons of CO2 every year.
For your car, it doesn’t matter if you buy petrol from a Shell, BP or Esso petrol station. But the climate impact of the refineries in which that fuel is made appears to vary widely. Each tonne of product from a Shell or BP refinery releases significantly more CO2 into the air than an ExxonMobil refinery. That is the company behind the brand name Esso.
The big differences between the oil refineries are striking. BP performed more than 28 percent worse than the European Commission benchmark in the years 2018 to 2021 inclusive. This is an efficiency level based on the most climate-friendly companies in a sector.
Simply put: if 1 ton of CO2 goes into the air at BP, it is 0.72 tons at a highly efficient refinery that makes the same products.
Shell is 26 percent below the benchmark. The Zeeland refinery of total and Lukoil is 17 percent below this and ExxonMobil ‘only’ 15 percent.
Maurice Esma, a co-founder of EconomicInform is a freelance journalist with the expertise in international finance and corporate rights. The author can be reached by email maurice.eisma@economicinform.com