Italy’s Eni has become the latest oil & gas supermajor to announce a long-term energy-transition strategy, promising to build more than 55GW of renewable energy by 2050 and reduce the emissions of its products by 80% by the same year.
The move does not go far as its rivals BP and Repsol, which this month promised to reduce their net emissions to zero by 2050, but Eni says its 80% target will keep it in line with the Paris Agreement.
The new strategy offers few details on the renewables component, other than setting short-term installed capacity targets of 3GW by 2023 and 5GW by 2025.
“The Eni of the future will… reinforce its role as a global player in the world of energy with renewables and circular economy activities,” said chief executive Claudio Descalzi.
“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.”
Despite the Italian company’s commitment to reduce its long-term emissions, it actually plans to increase its oil & gas production by 3.5% a year until 2025, before gradually reducing its oil output and focusing on natural gas. By 2050, it says, natural gas “will make up about 85% of total production”.
Its plan includes capturing and storing more than 10 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2050, while also offsetting three times that amount annually through forest conservation projects.
Other pledges include converting its European refineries “into bioplants, for the production of hydrogen and for the recycling of waste materials” and gradual conversion of its chemicals sites to make plastics “with identical characteristics to those produced by hydrocarbons” through the pyrolysis of “non-recyclable plastics”.
Pyrolysis is a process that heats feedstocks to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to create oils and synthetic gases that can then be converted into products that are usually made using hydrocarbons.
