Minimising Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Petroleum Sector: The Opportunity for Emerging Producers

The importance of limiting greenhouse gas emissions

  • Limiting climate change requires urgent, significant reductions of GHG emissions by the petroleum sector
  • The bulk of emissions relate to the end use of petroleum products, and are spread among many users, these are difficult to reduce
  • Emissions from upstream production of oil and gas are concentrated in producing countries that can act to have a significant impact by reducing them

The Opportunity for New Producers: To take the lead and protect their projects from stranding

  • Changing an established petroleum sector, designed for different standards, is very difficult
  • New producers have the opportunity to design their laws, regulatory systems, monitoring regimes and projects to minimise GHG emissions.
  • Emissions intensities vary widely; using existing technologies and best practice can enable new producers to be at the low end of those ranges
  • Doing so should make their projects less likely to become stranded as climate change related restrictions tighten

Minimising GHG emissions should be at the centre of all decisions about the sector

From initial project design => Through operating practices => To a fully funded decommissioning plan

The paper discusses

  • The levers that governments have at their disposal
  • The challenges governments face in moving from pledges to implementation
  • Suggests a framework for decision making and to support low GHG projects
  • Makes recommendations in each of the key areas
  • Provides links to further resources

Read the report: Minimising Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Petroleum Sector

This policy paper was co-produced by the African Natural Resources Management and Investment Centre (ANRC) of the African Development Bank, the Commonwealth Secretariat and the New Producers Group (NPG). It was also supported by a NORAD grant.

Fostering Resilience in Emerging Oil Producers

Summary

  • COVID-19 and the spring shock to oil markets had significant impacts on the emerging oil and gas producer countries that make up the New Producers Group. The crisis affected individuals, organizations and national plans for hydrocarbon sectors. The group held a series of discussions from March 2020 that aimed to assist governments in the development of crisis responses and strategies
    that could be adapted to an energy sector in transition.
  • In response to a crisis, the main priority is to understand its causes and review its impact. When much of public life shut down due to the pandemic in March 2020, it struck a blow to oil demand at a time when the market was already oversupplied. Oil prices fell sharply, which, together with the health crisis, prompted oil companies to reassess projects, upending operations in many countries.
  • While oil prices recovered partially in the months that followed, the sector remains in crisis – particularly in the more expensive emerging oil and gas producer countries. Prior to COVID-19, oil companies were already more risk averse in response to investor pressure.
  • The focus of the New Producers Group has turned to understanding what the new normal might look like post-crisis and in particular what impact the pandemic might have on the pace of the energy transition. The development of scenarios helped meeting attendees manage multiple uncertainties, such as the path of the pandemic, its economic impacts, policy responses and public support for the concept of building back better.
  • ‘Boom time’ is over for the oil sector. For emerging producers, the poor outlook means that there will be fewer projects and those that do go ahead will be low risk. But even in areas where continued oil company interest is likely, government planners should understand the risks associated with fiscal dependence on the petroleum sector and also with building up industry-specific local content.
  • National investment in the petroleum sector should be considered in relation to the potential returns it can generate and the negative impacts it could have on other national objectives, such as climate goals, environmental wellbeing, and fiscal stability.

The paper is available to download below.

You are invited to the launch of the report 3 March 2021 at 2pm GMT.

Post-pandemic outlook for the oil and gas industry

Atul Arya from IHS Markit returned to the Fostering Resilience in Crisis series to give us an updated outlook for the energy sector post-Covid. This meeting was under Chatham House Rule. Watch the highlights in the below video. The full recording is available on the members’ platform.

Highlights of the meeting

 

Finance and the energy transition

For this panel discussion on the role of finance in the energy transition, the New Producers Group brought together a range of different actors in the investment community, from banking and international finance institutions to private equity capital and fund managers. We asked them how they perceive the relative risk of oil, gas and renewables in emerging markets in light of Covid and the oil price slump. This meeting of the Fostering Resilience in Crisis series was on the record.

Highlights of the meeting

 

Full webinar recording 

 

The impact of Covid-19 and the oil market crash on the pace and course of the energy transitions

This meeting in the New Producers Group series Fostering Resilience in Crisis examined the impact of the oil price crash and the Covid pandemic on the pace and course of the energy transition, with a specific focus on the impact on oil and gas vs. energy alternatives. Two scenarios helped structure the discussion. The full recording is available on the members’ platform.

Highlights of the meetings

Gushing Money, Staying Green

Guyana has long existed outside the world’s gaze. The South American country has seen its historic industries of sugar and bauxite suffer a slow and gradual decline, leading many Guyanese to go abroad in search of better opportunities. But the slumbering capital Georgetown, with its old wooden houses built on stilts and interlaced with canals designed to control sea water levels, is suddenly bustling.

Hotels are full, with businessmen and consultants rushing in to be a part of its good fortune, which began in 2015 when ExxonMobil and its partners first discovered oil offshore. Since then 12 further oil discoveries have been made, making Guyana an oil hotspot.

Guyana is expected to produce 750,000 barrels a day by 2025, on a par with Brazil, its huge neighbour to the south. But the transformation is better grasped in per capita terms – Guyana will produce almost one barrel of oil per person per day. That is three times more oil per capita than Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates – though per capita revenues to the state are closer once the oil company’s costs and profits are deducted. The transformative nature of these discoveries for Guyana cannot be overstated.

Let us first take a step back and focus on the moment of the discovery for a new oil producer. This period is very intense, even in countries without such an exceptionally large windfall. Guyana can draw on the experience of other countries involved in the New Producers Group, a knowledge-sharing network for emerging oil and gas producers.

In these states, the oil sector is new and there are often only a handful of people in government with experience in the petroleum business. The pressure on these five or so individuals becomes overwhelming.

They – and soon the government more broadly – come under immense pressure from a number of sources: private sector consultants flock to government offices, lining up for opportunities; local job seekers get in touch hoping to find work in the oil sector; international donor agencies compete to be advisers and have their policy framework adopted; the public is also clamouring, asking how the discovery will transform their lives; and, of course, political opponents wait at each corner to challenge the soundness of any decision made.

There is also time pressure and the runup to first production – which might take anything from two to ten years –is the period during which the small team must draft and execute appropriate policies, laws and regulations to oversee the oil sector. This overwhelming pressure does not create the space for debates about big policy decisions. But this is just the time that a country wants to think about the direction in which it is heading, what kind of producer it wants to be, what it wants to do with its oil and gas and how it will spend the revenues.

Guyana was fortunate that President David Granger’s government came to power with a vision to guide the country’s development. It had set the course on green growth. Even after oil was discovered, it continued to develop its Green State Development Strategy. The goal is to ‘transition to a diversified green and inclusive economy, become a leading example of a Green State and serve as an inspiration to other countries in the region and worldwide’, according to the Guyana Department of Environment.

The strategy guides Guyana along a low-carbon pathway, with investments in ecotourism, renewable energy, emission caps and forest conservation, coupled with a concern for providing the Guyanese with a ‘better life’. But the big question is whether this vision sits well with the country becoming a leading oil exporter. No other country with oil reserves as large has pursued such an ecological vision.

So far the plan has held strong, most notably with the government’s decision not to bring the oil to shore for refining or other sorts of processing, and to use the export revenues to support renewables development and the diversification of the economy, as well as saving for the future through a sovereign wealth fund.

Investing revenues strategically is not as easy as it seems. The revenues are huge in relation to the national economy. Setting Guyana’s oil in context, its one-barrel-per- person-per-day target is many times greater than other emerging producers, such as Ghana, where the resource flows are only three barrels per person per year. The economy’s capacity to absorb revenues of this scale will be limited. The government can raise prosperity levels by investing in infrastructure, education and health but will need to contend with inflation. Expenditure will also need to grow incrementally, in line with the state’s administrative capacity to manage the spending.

There will inevitably be temptations to pursue a different course. Domestic pressure will mount to bring the oil ashore and to refine it in Guyana, making sure the country takes control of the industrial process and escapes the legacy of colonialism – British rule did little to develop the country. There will be calls for cheap oil and gas feedstocks to support Guyana’s industry and for subsidized fuel and power for consumers. In other words, there will be political pressure to benefit from the oil itself, not just the oil revenues.

But Guyana has the benefit of hindsight. It can see the experience of Gulf Arab producers, who created oil-intensive industries and introduced subsidies on petrol, power and water that created unsustainable patterns of domestic consumption. Subsidies and dependency on oil are very difficult to reverse, and they lock the country into a high-carbon economic model.

Guyana is starting its journey as an oil producer with information established producers did not have. The world’s energy usage is changing and oil is not forever. It is not yet known when oil demand will peak, but the industry agrees that it will peak. This means that Guyana must reap the benefits while it can, limit its dependence on oil, invest in diversification, create long-term wealth and save for the future.

Guyana is a unique test case of a new, major oil producer country guided by an environmental vision. It is in this sense emblematic of our changing world. As a developing nation, it wants to use its natural resources to invest in its future prosperity, but also avoid the mistakes of carbon lock-in made by others. This vision has great potential, if Guyana can stay the course.

Headwinds are already being felt. There will be elections by the end of the year which were triggered by a no-confidence motion. The opposition party, the People’s Progressive Party, has not yet taken a position on the high-level vision for Guyana, only calling for a critical review of oil contracts and institutions overseeing the sector, as well as a bigger push for local opportunities for Guyanese people and businesses to participate in the oil sector. The run-up to the elections will surely be the time to debate what kind of producer Guyana should become.