LONDON (CNBC) - Oil giant BP is committed to tackling climate change, the company’s CEO said, but he insisted that hydrocarbons such as oil and gas will have an ongoing role to play in the energy mix for years.
“It may not be popular to say that oil and gas is going to be in the energy system for decades to come but that is the reality,” BP’s Chief Executive Bernard Looney told CNBC on Monday.
“What I want us to do is to focus on the objective — and I wish we had less ideological positions and more focus on the objective — which in this case is to drive emissions down.”
He said that replacing coal with natural gas, thereby reducing carbon emissions, “has to be a good thing.”
“And then over time we will decarbonize that natural gas,” he said, speaking to CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at the ADIPEC energy industry forum in Abu Dhabi.
BP’s Looney highlighted that the International Energy Agency’s “Net Zero” report in May noted that, in 2050, global oil supply “in the net zero pathway” would still amount to around 20 million barrels per day,
“So any objective person ... is going to say that hydrocarbons have a role to play, the question then becomes: what do you do about that? And you try to produce those hydrocarbons in the best way possible,” Looney added.
Looney’s comments come after the conclusion of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. Nearly 200 countries agreed to “phase down” coal use (rather than “phase out,” with China and India insisting on the language change at the last minute), as well as to “phase out” fossil fuel subsidies and to improve financial support to low-income countries.